


Love is a Kind of Warfare

by Who_Needs_Reality



Category: Greek and Roman Mythology, The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gods & Goddesses, Alternate Universe - Mythology, Angst, Arranged Marriage, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Eventual Smut, F/M, Jealousy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-12
Updated: 2019-06-14
Packaged: 2020-01-12 01:05:21
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 42,136
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18435842
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Who_Needs_Reality/pseuds/Who_Needs_Reality
Summary: Death stole spring, spring loved death, and together they ruled the Underworld.If only the story were really that simple.{Hades and Persephone AU}





	1. Be still my heart; thou hast known worse than this

**Author's Note:**

> So...I'm baaaack! If you were wondering where I'd gone, honestly motivation to write fic has been kinda low for a while since I don't watch the show or keep up with much of it any more (and don't get me wrong, I'm happier that way RIP) but I do have two monster WIPs, including this one, that I am working on. This was supposed to be a single chapter but it's quickly gotten waaaaay out of hand so I am splitting it in the hope that people will like chapter 1 and encourage me to finish the rest quicker!
> 
> That being said, this is the most fun I've had working on a fic probably ever, mostly because years of obsessive Classics nerding have finally found their purpose. Just be aware that since I haven't watched an episode of the show in two years while I can't stfu about mythology for two minutes, this fic's inspo comes very very heavily from the latter. Which, again, was delightful for me, but just warning y'all!
> 
> Fic title and epitaph are from Ovid, chapter title is from Homer. Also no one else cares but for narrative purposes I have combined the roles of Hades and Thanatos in this story and I feel bad but it had to be done.

 

> **_Sic ego nec sine te nec tecum vivere possum_ **
> 
> _Thus I am not able to exist either with you or without you_

_Once and a time when the world was young, three brothers came to meet in the center of a great amphitheater that had not yet been built, but that would in the coming days become a sort of throne room, from which the fates of all men and gods would be watched._

_The eldest brother, who had been the last born yet first to live, outstretched his hands, each of which was curled into fists._

_“Brothers,” he said, “the war has been won. The time has come for us to divide the world into the pieces that we must now rule.”_

_The middle brother nodded._

_The youngest brother, though he was also the eldest as he had been the firstborn, waited._

_“For myself,” continued the eldest, “I have taken the lightning.”_

_His brothers watched as the great bolt that the cyclopes from their forges had given him sparked and glinted, as it had before he had hurled it upon the Titans._

_“I have taken the thunder, the heavens and the skies. I will be the Sky Father, and I will be the King God. And you shall call me Zeus, for that is the name I have chosen.”_

_The brothers looked at Zeus and said nothing._

_“You two,” he said, “shall have between you the Oceans and the Underworld. The realms will be yours to rule and yours to dwell in.”_

_“And how shall we decide?” asked the youngest brother._

_“Are we to choose?” asked the middle brother, who wondered which realm his sibling preferred, and privately hoped he would get it instead._

_Zeus smiled as only a god can smile, an edge of knowledge and cruelty glinting at the corners of his mouth. “Have we really finished fighting one war only to begin another?” He raised his hands which were still curled into fists. “Each of you. Pick one.”_

_“Do not presume to toy with us,” the middle brother scowled. “We are not children.”_

_“And yet you throw tantrums like one,” the youngest scoffed. “Come, let us be done with this. You may even choose first if you so wish.”_ _  
_

_The middle brother’s scowl deepened, but he reached forward and grasped Zeus’s right fist, leaving the youngest to clasp the left._

_When Zeus opened his hands, his right revealed a glittering chunk of lapis as hard and blue as the eyes of the middle brother. In his left was a piece of jet, as slick and black as the hair of the youngest._

_Zeus chuckled. “And there you have it,” he said, “blue for the oceans. Black for the underworld.”_

_The middle brother roared in triumph. “I shall preside over the oceans and the seas. I shall assume the mantle of the old man Oceanus and the waves themselves shall bow to me, and you shall call me Poseidon, for that is the name I have chosen.”_

_That left only the youngest. “I suppose then that I shall rule the Underworld.”_

_“Are you not pleased?” asked Zeus, one eyebrow raised. “To have dominion over death itself is no small thing.”_ _  
_

_“Indeed,” said the youngest. He turned so his brothers would not see him thinking._

_“And your name?” Poseidon asked, before he could leave the hall at the top of what they called Mount Olympus. “What name will you take?”_

_The youngest paused for a moment. “You may call me Hades,” he said._ The Unseen One _._

_And it has been that way since._

*

Each month, she looks forward to the summit. Perhaps this is strange, given that in truth, she never has nor ever will participate in it. But it is the one day on which her mother will always allow her to travel with her, to see the peak of the mountain where the greatest of gods had their thrones.

“You’ll be good for me,” her mother says, smiling, the way she does every year.

“Yes, mother.”

The goddess gives a hum of satisfaction and pats the wheat sheaves she has braided into her hair for the occasion. They shine golden in the goddess’s hair, for she is Demeter, and all the plants and the fruits of the Earth love her.

“May I go play now?” she asks.

“You may,” Demeter says, “be careful Kore. And be back before sundown.”

Kore nods before scampering off as fast as she can. Most people, she knows, would have ventured straight for the Great Hall. The marble columns and their gold trimmings are the most magnificent part of all the mountain, it is true. But Kore has never much been interested in magnificence and instead prefers to wander the grounds. Besides, the views from outside are, in her mind, more stunning than any throne room could be.

And anyway, if she plays outside, she can see when the Gods adjourned their council session and came to the gardens to begin their revels.

This month is no different -- as sundown comes, they emerge, the twelve Olympians, and with them the slew of minor godlings and nymphs and attendants and deities. Somewhere, the Muses strike up a song, and Dionysus wanders around with amphorae of wine, and soon, her father finds her.

“You’ve grown,” says Zeus, smiling. “I can see you’ll have your mother’s beauty.”

Demeter laughs, but Kore feels her mother’s arm coming round behind her because from the corner of her eye she could see the Queen watching her. Hera may be Kore’s aunt, sister to both of her parents, but she is first and foremost Zeus’s wife. The attendants and maids who look after Kore didn’t like telling her all the stories, but she knows enough to guess that Hera does not like the fact that her husband seems to have so many children with mothers who are not her.

Zeus gives her a present like he always does, a little trinket -- this time, it’s a brass deer, small enough to fit in the palm of her hand. It moves as though alive, nuzzling at the heel of her thumb. She laughs in delight.

“You like it?” her father asks. “Hephaestus himself crafted it in one his forges.”

“I love it!” she says. “Thank you, father.”

“My little Persephone,” he laughs. He has a different name for her than the one her mother uses, though Kore’s never been sure why. Gods all have many names.

When the revels ended and the summit is over, they go back home. Her mother was traveling somewhere else the next day, a faraway land that Kore had heard was by the sea.

“Please let me come!” she begged. “I want to see the sea.” _And the desert. And the groves. And the mountains._

“It’s not safe,” Demeter said, as she always did. “I don’t want anything to happen to you.”

*

Gods age differently than mortals. Kore grew fast and knew she would continue to do so until the year she reached her most beautiful, which is when she would stop, suspended in time forever. One year, when her hair has started to curl and her face is beginning to grow slim, one of the nymphs kisses her. It is only quick, and the other girl runs away giggling after, but Kore feels the heat rush to her cheeks and decides she likes it. There are more after that, girls with long hair she can tangle her fingers into and boys with pretty eyes. Demeter presses her mouth into a thin line whenever she catches Kore, but says nothing. Kore suspects her mother is just glad that she’s entertaining herself within the confines of her home.

She kisses a boy at the next summit -- it’s the big annual summit when all the gods from every reach of the cosmos attend -- a golden-haired minor godling who she leads by the hand to a secluded doorway, a little way from the main gathering.

“Shh,” she giggles, leaning up, “no one will see us here.”

“If only that were true.”

The boy stumbles backward as a figure emerges from inside the doorway.

“M-my lord,” he stammers, “we didn’t see you--”

“Evidently.” The man -- the _god_ \-- steps forward so Kore can see him in the light. She stifles a gasp.

“Lord Hades,” she ducks her head quickly. The god is seldom seen in the outside world, but he must be here for the summit.

“Persephone, isn’t it?” he looks faintly amused in a way that rankles her.

“That’s what my father calls me,” she allows.

“Ah.” Hades runs a hand through his slicked-back hair, his gaze already drifting away from her as though he’s bored. “Well, run along. I suspect your mother will be looking for you.”

She scowls but does as he says. The boy she was with springs off in another direction, muttering an excuse. Kore wanders away, a little annoyed. She decides she doesn’t like the Lord of the Dead.

*

She doesn’t really notice her powers until one of the dryads points them out, but they’re definitely there. Flowers spring up in the places she treads, and when she plucks them to tuck behind her ears or braid into her hair, they do not wither and die, but stay as fresh as though they had just reached full bloom. The breeze is always a little warmer when it flutters past her, the grass greener and lusher where she sits.

“In case there was any mistaking you were my daughter,” Demeter smiles, and Kore smiles back flatly.

It’s alright for her mother, whose powers are comparable to those of Gaia the Earth Mother. But pretty tricks with flowers don’t seem like much use to Kore.

Even Hera seems to think so -- the goddess smiles at her oscassionaly now,  when Kore sees her at the summits, sometimes inclining her head in greeting. It ought to be a relief, to know that she’s safe from the notorious wrath of the jealous Queen. But knowing that her powers are so paltry that Hera doesn’t think she’s worth resenting still leaves and an odd taste in Kore’s mouth.

She realises, too, that she will never participate in the summits as any more than her mother’s guest. All gods are welcome, it is true, but seats in the amphitheater -- where the issues are discussed and debated, where decisions are made -- are reserved only for the most powerful, influential gods. Kore’s fate it seems is to forever frolic in the meadows, idling with her companions and making pretty blossoms sprout, while the problems are solved without her.

She can’t stand it.

*

It’s not until a few summits later that she changes her mind. She’s lying with her eyes closed, letting the sunlight soak her skin when she hears a shout. Scrambling upright, she sees a dryad tumble to the ground, clutching at her ankle in agony.

“She was bitten!” someone cries out, and Kore can’t help but sigh. There aren’t any snakes on Olympus naturally, which means some petty god or wood spirit has transformed into one, or loosed a pet, probably as a prank.  

“My lord!” someone calls, “help! She needs help! Thank you, my lord.”

Kore feels him arrive before he does, not just the aura of power that all the major gods radiate, but an aura of warmth -- the warmth of pure, undiluted sunlight.

Even for a god, Apollo is beautiful -- smooth-faced and bare-chested, light seems to shine out of him. It’s hard to stare straight at him though; Kore thinks it would burn her.

“Let me work,” he says in a musical voice, unconcerned and perfectly calm. She stares as he reaches to the ground and uproots a handful of buds that Kore had made grow earlier when she was bored and waves his hand over it until it shimmers. The flowers crush in front of her eyes, as though ground by an invisible pestle and mortar, into a pale grey paste. Apollo murmurs something, a chant of some kind, as he applies the paste to the bite on the girl’s ankle. The wound -- which was a sickly green colour -- fades to a clean pink in front of her eyes, and the nymph’s strangled cries of pain quiet.

“Th-thank you my Lord,” the girl gasps, and the god fixes her with a slow, languid smile.

“It’s really no trouble,” he says. “If you must thank me, come find me later.” He winks at her before leaving.

Kore stumbles in her haste to jog after him.

“Lord Apollo,” she says, a little out of breath when she catches up with him.

“Oh hello.” He glances at her. “Demeter’s girl aren’t you? Persephone?”

“That is what many call me.”

“It’s true what they say. You are most becoming.”

Kore bristles, but bites back on any comments. Few things are worth inspiring the wrath of a god. “That ointment you applied on the nymph… you made it from my flowers.”

“I haven’t caused some grievous offense have I?” he asks, looking faintly amused, as though he does not much care one way or another, “uprooted some sacred symbol of yours?” His gaze flickers over her. “Will you be wanting any particular form of recompense?”

“I wish to know how you made it,” she tells him.

His expression tells her that it’s clearly not the response he was expecting.

“You used my flowers to heal,” she continues hastily. “If my gift can be used to do some real good, I’d like to know how.”

Apollo looks at her, considering.

Before the god can reply, she hears her mother hiss her name in a sharp voice.

“Kore. It’s time to go.”

Demeter is watching Apollo with a hard expression. When Kore reaches her, the goddess grasps her wrist.

“Leaving already Demeter?” the sun god asks.

Demeter doesn’t respond. She’s already whisked Kore away.

“Don’t you know better than to go cavorting around with the likes of him?” Demeter snaps when they’re home. “You need to keep yourself out of trouble.”

“I wasn’t doing anything dangerous!” she protests. “I only wanted--”

“You have no idea _what’s_ dangerous.”

“Because you won’t let me learn! I have to discover these things for myself, mother.”

“There is no sense in traipsing about endangering yourself because you’re curious,” Demeter says, hands on hips. “It is my duty to make sure you’re _safe_.”

Demeter kisses Kore on the cheek and disappears, vanishing in a swirl of grain.

Kore scowls after her.

*

The men appear out of nowhere. Kore blinks up at them for a second, to make sure she’s not imagined them.

“That must be her,” the younger of the two says.

“Lady Persephone?” asks the other. He holds a staff. Kore thinks it is elaborately engraved, but peering more closely, she realises that a single live snake is wrapped around the rod.

“Who’s asking?”

“My name is Asclepius,” he answers. “My father sent me.”

His beard and crow’s feet and grey-flecked hair make him look at least twenty years Apollo’s senior, but the gods can choose and change their forms as it suits them; there’s no reason for it not to be true.

“What does Lord Apollo want from me?”

Asclepius smiles. “I believe it’s a matter of what you wanted from him.” He gestures at the patchwork of brightly coloured flowers dappled around Kore in the grass.

She stands. “You can teach me?”

“My father is a patron of healing,” he says, “his powers can reattach severed limbs and turn poison back to clean blood. The gifts he has require the power of a god far greater than you or I could hope to be. But the paste he used?” Asclepius smiles. “Medicine.”

“Medicine?”

“You could say it’s my particular gift. Those of us that don’t have such an unfettered supply of power to rely on must learn to use the tools around us to our advantage.” Asclepius gestures at the ground around their feet with his staff. “You may look at your gift and decide you produce shrubbery. I see you as producing _ingredients_. Ingredients, which, if implemented correctly, will heal as well as any powers can.”

Kore stares at him. “You’d really teach me?”

“The healing arts aren’t to be jealously guarded,” he says. “I am only too happy to impart my knowledge. If you would like to learn.”

“Yes,” she says, “ _yes_. Thank you!”

Asclepius smiles. “There is just the simple matter of your mother.”

Kore stills, brought abruptly back to reality. “She’ll never allow this.”

“And no one is eager to cross the Lady Demeter,” says the other man. “Which is why these lessons must remain a secret.”

“Sorry,” Kore blinks, “I didn’t… who are you?” she blurts out.

He laughs. “It appears I’ve forgotten to introduce myself -- my name is Nicomachus. I’m Lord Asclepius’ clerk.”

“What’s that?” she asks. Kore doesn’t always understand the words people bring back from the mortal world, carrying meanings that don’t make sense in the godly realm.

“A clerk,” Nicomachus explains, “it’s like a scribe of sorts. I travel with Lord Asclepius and write down what he discovers.”

“Oh,” Kore nods slowly.

He laughs. “It sounds trivial, perhaps, but it’s important work. I record whatever we discover to ensure we remember it, learn from it.”

A clerk. He pronounces it like  _clarke_ , and she likes the way her tongue rolls around the word. She smiles. “So you’ll be recording my lessons?”

Nicomachus produces a scroll from somewhere. “Exactly.”

Kore bites her lip. “Is this really going to work? In secret?”

The men exchange a glance, and something mischievous lights up the clerk’s eyes. “There’s only one way to find out.”

*

Somehow, it does work. They appear in the glade at the same time every day. Sometime Asclepius comes bearing an assortment of clay jars and tools that he wants her to use, other times they spend their whole session examining the flowers and leaves and buds that Kore can grow.

“Try this one,” Asclepius says, showing her a sketch that Nicomachus has drawn. She concentrates, and it springs from the ground in front of them, a little cluster of deep purple blossoms with rounded petals.

“Excellent!” Asclepius says, looking positively delighted. “Do you realise what this means, Persephone?”

“What?”

“If you hone your skills, you can produce a limitless supply of medicine wherever you go. Heal wherever you are needed.”

Kore gives a delighted huff of laughter, before her expression drops. “What good is it if I can’t go anywhere?” She sighs when Asclepius gives her a plaintive look. “You know it’s true. My mother wouldn’t let me out of her realms if they were on fire. I haven’t even tried to heal anyone for real yet.”

The clerk coughs. “Yes. We had been discussing that. And we may have an idea.”

Kore looks from one man to the other.

“We’d have to be quick,” he continues, “never gone for too long. And the nymphs would have to be distracted…”

“Nico…” she shakes her head slowly, “you think I haven’t tried sneaking out before? My mother can feel the leaves fall from her sacred trees, I think she’d notice if her only daughter went missing.”

“Not if you went while she was attending to prayers,” Nico says, grinning.

“What?”

“You know mortals make sacrifices or offer prayers,” Asclepius explains. “When the gods attend to those matters, their focus tends to be… targeted.”

“Meaning if we were to, say, keep track of when Lady Demeter channels her attention towards her temples and followers each day, we could theoretically find a window of time in which we could… venture outwards.” Nico waves one of his scrolls triumphantly. “And fortunately for you, my Lady, it just so happens you have a very dedicated clerk who has recorded just such information.”

“It’s risky,” Kore says, but her heart is racing with possibility.

“We know.” Nico shrugs.

“If we’re caught she might turn you into barley.”

“I like barley.”

“She could--”

“No one is disputing the risk we would all face, Persephone,” Asclepius smiles gently. “But if it is in the service of helping you develop abilities that could do untold good in the world, then it is a chance I am proud to take.”

Their first expedition outside is the next day. They wait until the shadows are just-so, and Nico taps at his scroll authoritatively, saying “we have until sundown,” and then Asclepius takes Kore’s hand and slams his staff into the ground. She feels like she trips off a precipice, a sudden swooping sensation in her stomach and her surroundings blurring around her, and then suddenly she is steady again. But they’re not in her mother’s lands any longer.

It’s some sort of town, low buildings clustered around a quiet marketplace, a few people milling around. It’s late in the day, not busy, but Asclepius stops Kore from taking her hood down.

“The less likely people see you, the safer we are.”

They move through the back alleyways, stopping at the door of one of the smallest houses near the outskirts of the settlement. Peering in through the window, Kore sees a woman bent over a bed. The figure in the bed isn’t moving, and the woman is crying.

“She’s been praying for her son all week,” Nico murmurs.

They wait until the woman wipes at her eyes and stands, picking up an empty amphora and leaving to fetch some more water. Kore and Nicomachus file in after Asclepius, crowding around the low cot.

Her heart twists when she sees him -- he’s barely more than a child, his boyish face still round with baby fat. There’s a sallowness to his complexion though, and his breaths sound laboured and ragged. She can feel the heat from a fever radiating off him.

“Go on,” Asclepius whispers, nodding at her.

Kore stares at him, eyes wide. “I--”

“You know what to do,” he assures her.

Kore nods slowly, taking a steadying breath. She ducks to the ground just outside the house, closing her eyes in concentration. It takes a moment, but finally, she waves her hand over the ground, watching as the ground erupts with blooms -- white willow and ginger to bring down the fever, echinacea and licorice flower for breathing. Plucking what she needs and hurrying back inside, she works as quickly as she can with the utensils Asclepius has brought. She boils ups tinctures and grinds pastes. She murmurs the special hymns and spells she’s been taught as she applies the medicines, conscious all the while of the scribbling of Nicomachus’ quill.

“I think I’m done,” she declares finally, wiping her brow.

The boy stirs on the bed. She can see the rise-and-fall of his chest even out as his breaths come more easily.  

“It worked,” Asclepius murmurs behind her.

Nicomachus claps her on the shoulder, and she grasps at his hand in excitement.

“I did it?”

“You did,” Nico laughs, and she hugs him in delight.

*

In the following days, it keeps on working. Kore finds it easier and easier to conjure up the plants she requires. She can identify which flower or herb will help with which symptoms and ailments, almost without thinking about it. Her hands move more deftly now, with a speed and dexterity that belie her godly lineage.

And the people -- there are children, ill in their beds, who Kore gets to see sit up, rubbing their eyes and mumbling that they feel better as their overjoyed parents wrap them in relieved embraces. Husbands and wives clasp their hands together, whispering prayers of thanks that their loved one is safe. An old man smiles as he wakes up -- three days of acute chest pains having eased overnight -- patting the bed next to him so his brood of grandchildren can clamber up next to him.

“You give that to them,” Nico tells her when they get back to Demeter’s lands one day. “It’s strange. I record the symptoms they have and the ingredients you use and the medicines you make and whether or not they work. But the most valuable part of it all is the after.”  
“It doesn’t seem real,” she admits. “It feels like I keep waiting for myself to make a mistake. For something to go wrong.”

Nico elbows her and tells her she worries too much. And he’s right, things seem to keep going right. She keeps saving people.

And then one day, she doesn’t.

It’s a young man with a nasty head gash, and Kore does everything she’s supposed to. She conjures the yarrow and makes a dressing, applies pressure to stop the bleeding, cleans the wound--

And then Asclepius grabs her wrist, stilling her.

“What are you doing? I have to--”

“No.”

She looks up, and her heart stops when she sees him standing at the foot of the bed.

“What are you doing here?” she gapes stupidly.

Nico throws her a panicked glance, and she shakes herself.

“Excuse me -- It’s just… I wasn’t expecting to see you here, Lord Hades.”

The God of the Dead tilts his head to the side. “I might say the same to you, Lady Persephone. Though I imagine your mother isn’t expecting you to be here either.”

Kore feels her cheeks flame, and she squares her shoulders, determined not to let him talk to her as though she were a child.

“I’m here working.”

“Ah.” His eyes flick to the dressing on the man’s head. “Your doing?”

She says nothing, just fixes Hades with a hard stare.

The god’s lips quirk in a derisive half-smile. “A valiant effort. But I’m afraid in this case, a futile one.”

“What do you mean?” she demands.

“Persephone...” next to her, Asclepius sounds wary.

Hades sighs. “I know you want to save his life. But his time has come.”

“What? No!” she protests. “You can’t just--”

“Let Lord Hades do his work, Persephone,” Asclepius warns in a low voice.

“I’m not just going to give up!”

“It’s not about giving up,” Asclepius insists. “It’s the nature of mortals to die. The treatments we administer may give them more time, but once the Fates have cut their threads, we must let them go.”

“You can’t just march in and do that!” she protests, ignoring Nico’s hisses at her to be quiet.

Hades’ smile is as hard and cold as a silver drachma. “I understand that you may be the princess of your mother’s realm. But when it comes to matters of life and death, I’m sorry to say I have to do _exactly_ that.”

“But--”

“Persephone, _stop_.” Nico’s voice bears no trace of the humour she’s come to expect from him. The clerk takes her hand, squeezes while she watches.

Hades seems to pay no further attention to her, to any of them, as he leans over the boy’s body, murmuring an incantation and passing a hand over his head.

Kore stares, and for a moment she thinks she’s seeing double as the boy appears to sit up -- but no, it’s not him, or not really him. It’s a hazy impression of him, a ghostlike mirage sitting up while the flesh-and-blood body remains lying down.

“It’s his soul,” Nico whispers.

Hades extends his hand, and the soul figure, who looks exactly as the boy does, but translucent and without the head wound, takes it, blinking slowly. The Lord of the Underworld murmurs another prayer, and in a sudden swirl of black smoke and shadow, both of them are gone.

Kore hurries to the bed, pressing her hand to the boy’s head, his throat, his chest.

“He’s dead,” she says. “I didn’t -- I couldn’t save him.”

“There’s nothing you could have done,” Nico assures her, coming to wrap an arm around her shoulder. “His time was up.”

“We must leave,” Asclepius says, his voice clipped. He grips Kore’s shoulder and raps his staff on the ground, magicking them back to Demeter’s lands.

Asclepius doesn’t speak for a long moment. “I realize,” he says after a while, “that it may not always be easy. But understand this -- no one, not even a god, can cheat death.”

*

She understands. She doesn’t like it, doesn’t stop glowering at Hades whenever he does appear at the sickbeds she’s working on. But she stops fighting. When the god emerges in his cloud of black, she steps away, lets him wrest the soul from the body.

It’s never pleasant -- she sees him snuff out the life of an old man as his wife sleeps next to him, take the final breaths of a mother whose children play just outside.

“You’re warming to me I see,” Hades remarks once with a smirk when Kore angles her body away slightly to let him pass by her and reach the body more easily.

“How can you make jokes?” she spits, “a man is _dying_.”

His gaze shutters, and in his expression she sees suddenly the ancient might of the God of the Underworld. “I can assure you,” he says, his voice dangerously calm, “that I of all people know the meaning of death.” He doesn’t talk to her after that.

Sometimes there are weeks, months that stretch by without him appearing. Other times, sometimes after a town has been struck by a bought of sickness, or they go to work on a battlefield, he is there almost every day.

She really does not like the Lord of the Dead.

Still, Kore doesn’t let him weigh her down overmuch. She works, harder than she’s ever worked before. Her skills develop more strongly each day -- Asclepius usually lets her tend to patients unsupervised these days, working on others by himself. Nico says he’s on the way to filling an epic with the number of notes he takes while she works, and Kore rolls her eyes at the clerk. She’s secretly pleased though.

She’s even more pleased when one day, Asclepius takes her to the sea.

“It’s risky,” he warns, “you’re near Poseidon’s territory and it’s no secret he’s got a glad eye for your mother. If word of your presence gets to him, he’ll likely tell her.”

“I understand,” Kore says.

Asclepius regards her, expression grave. “So you’ll be careful?”

“Yes.” She nods.

The god’s face breaks into a grin. “Good.”

The sea is… _wonderful_. It’s huge, more vast than anything Kore could have imagined. She’d heard it was blue, but she couldn’t have pictured this precise  _shade_ of blue, so sharp it’s almost green, glittering like glass. And it sings too, a constant mighty whisper of waves. The breeze around it is balmy, thick with salt. She’s never seen anything like it.

Asclepius won’t let her wade into the water, insisting that Poseidon would notice, but she doesn’t mind. She’s surprised however when instead of leading her towards the houses clustered in the nearby village, Nicomachus and Asclepius start for the clifftop overlooking the beach, at the top of which stands a marble palace.

“What are we doing?” she asks, wary.

“Our patient today is of royal birth,” Asclepius says. “I think you’re ready to attempt work on a more high profile client.”

“High profile?” she protests. “A title doesn’t mean his life is worth more!”

“No,” Nico agrees, “but it does mean his family is more likely to try to execute someone if you fail to heal him.”

Kore swallows.

It’s only their godly powers, she surmises, that allow them to sneak into the palace unnoticed -- there are guards and attendants at every corner. Asclepius stops outside the doors to a large chamber in the center of the palace.

“His name is Prince Pirithous,” he whispers, “his father is Ixion, King of Larissa. Officially.”

“What do you mean, _officially_ ?”

“ _Un_ officially,” Nico offers, “he was fathered by Zeus, who took the form of a stallion and coupled with the Queen.”

Kore wrinkles her nose. “That’s charming.”

“Congratulations,” the clerk chuckles, “you’re about to meet your first Hero.”

“Go on, you two,” Asclepius says, “I have a sleeping draught I need to administer to the cook. I shall meet you back here when I’m done.”

With that, he’s gone, leaving Kore and Nico to hurry into the room.

The prince is sleeping, fitful, on the bed. His golden hair is matted with sweat and he’s flushed with fever, but Kore can tell the young man is handsome.

The work is second nature to her at this point -- for a little while, there is nothing save the flurry of activity between her magicking plants and boiling and grinding and mixing, and the constant scratching of Nicomachus’ quill. When she finishes, she has a small bowl of pale green syrup.

“Hold his nose,” she tells the clerk.

Nico sighs dramatically but does as he’s asked, pinching the Prince’s nostrils shut. Still asleep, his mouth drops open, and Kore pours the syrup gently down his throat. Nico lets him go, and they watch, satisfied, as the Prince’s breathing grows steady.

“Good,” Kore assesses, turning back to clear up her workstation quickly, waving her hand over it so it disappears.

“Who are you?” a groggy voice behind her rasps.

She and Nico both stiffen.

Realising there’s nothing for it, Kore turns slowly to face the young man in the bed. Who’s now sat up. Awake.

“Um.” She hesitates, feeling trapped. _He’s half god_ , she reasons, _he must be healing faster_. It makes sense, but it doesn’t help her out of her present predicament. “I’m a healer,” she offers vaguely. “You were sick.”

“I feel much better now,” he says, wiping his face with his hand. He looks at her again, his gaze more clear-eyed.

She glances nervously over her shoulder, half-starts for the door, but he catches her wrist.

“Please,” he says, “don’t go.”

“I…”

Nico looks panicked, but there’s nothing they can do. If they call for help, even more people will spot them, and they can’t go anywhere without Asclepius.

“My name is Pirithous, Prince of Larissa. I give you my thanks for saving my life.”

“I don’t know that I saved your _life_ ,” she says, mildly.

Shakily, Pirithous gets to his feet. He’s tall, taller than Kore. Her eyes widen when he brings her hand to his mouth, pressing a chaste kiss to her fingers.

“I apologise for being forward, but I must say… your skills in the healing arts, it would seem, are surpassed only by your beauty.”

“My lady!” Nico hisses, his eyes darting quickly to the door. _Asclepius._

“I must go,” she says quickly, pulling her hand away. She tugs her hood back up, hurrying out of the door with Nico behind her.

“Won’t you tell me your name?” Pirithous calls behind her.

She rounds the corner and grabs Asclepius’ arm, whispering urgently for him to _take us back_!

Asclepius rams his staff to the ground so quickly that they all stumble when they land back in Demeter’s field.

“He doesn’t know who I am,” Kore says, mostly to herself. “He won’t be able to find out. We’ll be fine.”

Asclepius twists the staff in his hand. The snake entwined around it writhes up and down. “I hope for all our sake’s you’re right,” he says.

Nico shrugs. “I don’t think the Prince means her harm.” He grins. “Quite the opposite, I’ll wager.”

Kore scowls at him. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Really?” the clerk laughs, “because you’re blushing.”

*

The sickness that comes is a bad one. It spreads through the mortal villages like wildfire, and Asclepius looks more strained each day as he is summoned by prayers from every which direction.

“It’s catching,” he explains, “the disease. They pass it on to each other. We have to hope it peters out before it reaches the cities, or there’ll be too many victims for us to treat.”

They toil and slave as much as they can -- and Kore knows Asclepius keeps working almost constantly, even after she is returned to the safe coop of Demeter’s realms each day -- but still, it seems like Hades appears at every other sickbed. She feels as though she’s sick herself each time she sees him, plucking mortals souls from their bodies and steering them away as efficiently and mechanically as though he were harvesting fruit. There’s scarcely time for her to be angry at him though -- there’s always someone else for her to tend to.

“Do you ever wish we hadn't come?” Nicomachus asks her one day, just after Hades has swept off another patient. Nico’s face has grown more drawn with each new wave of death, as his records grow heavier and heavier with the numbers of fatalities each day. “You wouldn’t have to see all this if we hadn’t taken you from your mother’s lands.”

“Just because I wouldn’t be seeing it doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be happening,” she tells him, trying to sound more assured than she feels. Kore isn’t lying -- if suffering like this exists, she wants to know about it -- to help, even if it isn’t easy. And it _isn’t_ easy. Living the life of an immortal makes Kore wonder if she’ll ever get used to death. It’s a unique sort of horror, she thinks, for these people to witness their loved ones snatched away in front of them. For all that makes a person to just _end_ suddenly, snuffed out like a flame in the rain.

“It’s the way of mortals,” Asclepius assures her, whenever Hades leads another soul away “death is an inevitability.” Kore can’t help but notice that he looks as tired as she’s ever seen a god look.

But she accepts it.

And then comes the baby. She’s a tiny, squalling thing, wriggling in her cot, a wracking cough keeping her from sleeping. Kore strokes the downy hair on her head gently while she works, humming a lullaby to try to soothe her to sleep. The baby gives a pathetic little snuffle, and Kore swears she feels her heart splinter a little.

“Take a sip of this, little one,” she whispers, propping the baby up in her arms and raising a bowl of medicine to the baby’s lips, “you’ll feel better, I promise.”

“Lady Persephone.”

She goes rigid. She pulls the baby closer into her chest. “No.”

Hades stands there, motionless. Waiting.

“Please,” Kore whispers, “she’s just a baby.”

“I know.” Hades doesn’t move.

“Don’t you ever,” she says, “ _ever_ show any mercy?”

“Persephone!” Nicomachus gasps. “My lord, we apologise, she’s simply--”

“It’s alright,” Hades says, quiet. “But that doesn’t change the fact that I need to do this.”

Nico wraps an arm around Kore, murmurs for her to “go on,” and slowly, she lowers the baby back into its crib. She turns to hide her face in Nico’s shoulder, but at the last second can’t look away. She watches as Hades reaches into the crib, watches as the baby goes still while the god picks up her soul, cradles it in his arms. Hades murmurs something to the tiny figure, presses a kiss to its head. The baby soul gurgles, grasps the Lord of the Dead’s finger. Hades smiles at her gently, and they disappear.

Kore catches herself thinking that had almost looked… tender. But he had been there to take a life, to take a _baby_. There can be nothing tender, or soft, or loving -- not in the arms of Death.

She doesn’t realise she’s crying until Nico brushes the tears from her face, hugging her tighter to him until she stops shaking.

The illness passes soon after that, drifting from the town like a storm cloud blown away.

*

“Just give me a moment,” Kore calls from her window when she hears the pebble thrown against it, “I’ll just be out.”

She hurries down, already asking “where are we working today? I was thinking about using asafoetida root in the tincture to bring down the--”

It isn’t Asclepius or Nicomachus.

“What are you doing here?” is the only thing she can think to say.

Pirithous smiles, bashful. “Excuse me, my lady, it appears I’ve startled you.”

“How did you find me?” she demands.

“Well, I couldn’t forget you after you saved me. Your face lingered in my mind. Imagine my surprise when I saw that same face etched in the frieze of the Temple of Demeter in Northern Thessaly.”

She stares at him. “So you…”

“Ventured to Lady Demeter’s realms in the hopes of catching another glimpse of her daughter.”

“Most people await an invitation,” she says.

“I had no wish to wait.”

“Forgive me but… I still don’t know quite why you’ve come.”

“Ah,” the Prince gives her a lopsided smile. “Don’t worry. I just came to _thank you_ for saving me.” There’s a gleam in his eye like he’s sharing a joke with her, though she couldn’t say what it was.

Another pebble rattles at the window, and she tenses. “I have to go,” she says, “and so do you.”

Pirithous inclines his head, mock-serious and still smiling. “Of course. I shall be on my way.”

She hesitates. “Please, you mustn’t tell anyone about me. No one can know what I do.”

She clasps his hand to implore him, but when she moves to drop it, he tugs her in, quick and unexpected. She trips into his embrace in surprise, and then he’s _kissing_ her. When he lets her go, she realises he’s stolen her breath a little.

Unconsciously, she raises a hand to her lips, feels a blush rise in her cheeks.

“It shall be our secret,” he assures her, eyes steady on hers.

“I…” From somewhere within the house, she hears the clatter of footsteps emerging from one room to another. The sound startles her back into action.

Kore ends up bundling him outside via a back entrance. “Please leave quickly,” she hisses.

He offers a quick bow. “I shall see you again Lady Persephone.” Pirithous doesn’t say it like it’s a question.

“What took you so long?” Nicomachus asks when she finally emerges outside.

“I’ll tell you later,” she mutters under her breath.

She does, later that day, once they’ve finished with a patient and they’re sat leaning against the wall of the house waiting for Asclepius.

Nico lets out a low whistle when she finishes explaining. “Well if nothing else, you have to admire the balls on that man. Venturing into a goddess’ kingdom to flirt?”

Kore shakes her head. “Would you stop grinning like an idiot! He’s not supposed to know who I am! If my mother catches me--”

“Let’s forget about the perils of divine wrath for a moment. Do you _like_ him?”

“Don’t be absurd!”

“I’m as serious as a Fury. A handsome charming prince has his eye on you, are you telling me you’re not even a little flattered? Or, well, _tempted_?”

“Stop it.”

“You are.”

“You’re being absurd.”

“You _are_.”

“ _Stop_.” She nudges him. “Yes, fine, he’s handsome!”

“Ha! And what dishes can we expect at the wedding feast?”

“Oh shut up,” she shoves at his head playfully. But then she sighs and goes serious. “I’m not marrying him.”

“Well, not yet obviously, but--”

“No. I’m not marrying him, not now and not ever. Him or anyone else.”

Nico doesn’t say anything to that, just sits and waits quietly for her to speak, and she loves him for it.

“I just… I can’t think of any fate sadder than finding someone you love and then watching over the millennia as that love fades and they’re unfaithful to you and you both end up parenting a slew of children from other loveless dalliances for the rest of your existences. And that is what happens, isn’t it?”

She thinks of Hera. Yes, the Queen of the Gods may be jealous, cruel even. But she loves her husband, she is faithful. And for what? Out of all his many lovers, _she_ is Kore’s father’s wife, only to be cast forever as the envious witch hell-bent on ruining the lives of all the girls and boys who steal the pieces of Zeus’ heart that she doesn’t get. Kore can’t help but feel sad for her. It doesn’t seem much of a union, not that she’d ever explain it.

“Perhaps it doesn’t always have to be that way,” Nico offers, but he reaches over to squeeze her hand in sympathy, and Kore knows he sees the truth in what she’s saying. She thinks of poor Lord Hephaestus, utterly devoted to the Lady Aphrodite -- to love herself -- who spends her days luxuriating in Ares’ bed, without a care for her husband’s heart. Or of Apollo and his hoard of lovers, mortals whose fragility and death lead to the god’s heartbreak or else others who did not want his attentions but could do nothing to evade the interest of a god, and found themselves destroyed as a result.

No, there is no happiness to be found in loving or being loved by a god, Kore knows. And certainly no happiness awaits a god who marries.

“Here,” Nico says, shifting so she can see his scroll better, “do you want to have a look at some of my notes from the stomach fever cases of the last weeks? I think I found something interesting about the way the mugwort root works depending on the way you were preparing it.”

Recognising the attempt at a lighthearted distraction it is, Kore acquiesces nonetheless, resting her head on the clerk’s shoulder and letting him occupy her mind with talk of medicines and other things.

*

The next annual summit is upon them quicker than Kore could have realised. Demeter seems a little suspicious that the event seems to have snuck up on her daughter this year.  
“Usually I’d have thought you’d be counting down the days,” her mother says.

“Oh. I must have lost track of time,” Kore mutters, hoping she sounds convincingly nonchalant.

Demeter regards her for another long moment but lets it go. It is time to leave.

The summit is the biggest one of the year of course, and as such, it is already alive with activity when they arrive. Olympus has been overtaken by a large market of sorts, along with performers, tradespeople, craftsmen. Gods and nymphs, satyrs and naiads, dryads and centaurs even heroes and a few chosen mortals mingle on the mountaintop. The Olympians themselves draw much attention, looking magnificent as they all file into the amphitheater to hold council. Hades is there too, Kore notes, not an Olympian, but too powerful not to invite to preside for the yearly summit.

She lets herself get lost in the flurry of action, catching up with old friends, wandering around the market, tasting food and buying trinkets.

When the sky turns to dusk and the greater gods reemerge from their meeting, an air of festivity settles over the gathering, and activity turns to revelry. The music grows louder, and people start to dance. Kore joins in, letting various partners spin and twirl her to the rhythm of the songs. All around her, there is a raucous celebration. Aphrodite and Ares move sensuously in the middle of the gathering, completely absorbed in one another. A gaggle of cloud nymphs links arms and spin in a circle until their faces blur. Satyrs stagger around, already drunk on wine and nectar, trying their hands at flirting with various goddesses. Even Hades has joined in, though he and his small contingent from the Underworld stay sat by the food stalls. He has a pretty, dark-haired naiad on his lap who keeps leaning down to whisper in his ear.

Kore lets out a cry of delight when she spots Nicomachus laughing with a group of attendants and minor godlings. A beam splits across his face when he sees her, and he breaks away to come greet her.

“Careful,” he laughs when she throws her arms around his neck, “you don’t want your mother to spot you and wonder how in Gaia’s name you’ve become so well-acquainted with a mere clerk!”

“Let her wonder,” Kore declares with an uncharacteristic abandon, the good mood of the night somewhat infectious. “Come, let’s go get some wine.” She links her arm through his, delighted to see her friend away from work for once. They pick their way through the crowd before they manage to find an entire pithos of wine, left by the drinks tables, and drag it away between the two of them. She laughs until her sides hurt.

It isn’t long before they’re _drunk_ , both of them. Nico keeps hiccuping and then clapping a hand over his mouth, looking scandalised, which sets Kore off into fits of giggles.

“I want to go lie down!” she tells him tugging on his arm, “in the meadows! The grass is all…” she frowns, searching for the word, “ _springy_.”

“That’s because of _you,_  silly,” he retorts in an exaggerated whisper. “You make it like that because, you know,” he waves his hands around. “Your plant magicky thing.”

They start down one of the quieter backways towards Olympus’s open meadows, and then somehow end up deciding to race. Kore takes off at a sprint, ignoring Nicomachus as he jeers behind her because she has to _win_ , so she runs faster, faster, but then she hears Nico gaining on her, so she turns a corner sharply, hurtling down the cobblestoned path -- and running face-first into something solid.

“ _Ouch,_ ” she mutters indignantly, dimly aware of a pair of hands coming forward to steady her as she sways slightly.

“This isn’t the finish line, ‘Seph-ne,” she hears Nico come up behind her, “we still have to -- oh.”

Lord Hades sighs as he releases her. “It _would_ be you two, wouldn’t it?”

She gapes at him and then lets out a little _oh_ when she realises he’s not alone -- the naiad she’d seen him with before emerges from behind him. She looks flushed, and a little disheveled.

“My lord, who is it?” she whispers.

Hades doesn’t take his eyes off her. “It’s Demeter’s little earth Princess, Persephone, and her friend,” he says, dismissive.

“We’re leaving now!” Nico says, grabbing at Kore’s hand. She catches his eye and the absurdity of the situation takes a hold -- they just interrupted _Hades_ in the middle of his courting.

They sprint off in the other direction before their peals of laughter can overcome them.

*

Asclepius gives her the next day off, only appearing briefly to instruct her to take fennel tea for the blinding headache and uneasy stomach she wakes up with.

“May this be a lesson to you in the virtues of moderation,” he tells her, with a disapproving expression.

Although, unless she’s imagining it, there is a glimmer of amusement in the wise old god’s eyes.

*

Whatever else Kore may be, she is still a goddess. It is curious to know that even though a human might glance at her and think her no more than twenty-one, she was born before most of their great grandparents. She still feels young, and by the standards of gods, she is. But she is used to the gods’ way of thinking. Time melts away slowly. Change is the stuff of centuries and eons, not days and weeks.

At least, that’s what she’s always believed.

It’s what makes it all so much more confusing that when things go wrong, they go wrong so very quickly.

The day begins like any other. They do their rounds quickly. By now, Asclepius and Kore work so well together they can cure an entire town in the time they work together each day. They do run a little late today, however, and by the time they’re done, it’s almost sundown. They take off at a sprint as Asclepius rams his rod into the ground, and the landing back into Demeter’s lands is a slightly rough one. Kore staggers a little as they hit the ground, having to catch herself on a tree. She grins when she turns to see that Nicomachus has tripped and hit the ground.

“Get up, you clumsy oaf,” she tells him, nudging at him with her foot.

He doesn’t move.

“You’re so dramatic,” she says, rolling her eyes and offering him her hand, “come on, up you get.”

He doesn’t move, doesn’t even react.

Next to her, Asclepius crouches down, and then Kore knows with sudden clarity that something is wrong.

She stoops down, turning Nico over gently. She draws in a sharp breath. He’s hit his head on a rock. The wound isn’t big, just a cut and small bump, but he’s unconscious.

“Alright,” she says, taking a breath, letting her training kick in. “I’ll apply pressure to the wound.” She tears a strip from her chiton and presses it to her friend’s head, soaking up the blood. “We need some witch hazel--” she waves a hand over the ground and the plant bursts through the soil-- “to clean the wound. And then we can prepare a dressing.”

“Persephone.”

“If you take over holding this down, I can start on--”

“Persephone.”

“Do you think we need to bathe the wound before dressing it? Because I think we might avert inflammation that way.”

“Persephone,” Asclepius’ voice goes sharp, “I suspect the bleeding may be internal.”

She swallows past the lump in her throat. “Okay. We can work with that. We just need to recalibrate our treatment to focus on treating the…”

Kore feels him arrive, like a shadow passing over her on a bright day. She swears she feels the air grow colder where he stands.

The words he speaks next are not words she’s ever heard from a god before. “I’m sorry,” he says, low and quiet.

“You can’t have him,” Kore says. Her voice sounds steady and calm, as though she’s reasoning with a child. _Not this one. This one doesn’t belong to you_. “He’s alright.”

Hades doesn’t say anything, but he doesn’t move either.

“I think we should try a compress,” she continues as if nothing has happened.

“His string has been cut,” Hades says, “the Fates have ruled it.”

“The Fates be _damned_ , you can’t have him!”

“Lord Asclepius,” Hades still sounds measured, which infuriates her, “please.”

“Let him go, child.”

Kore stares at him. Asclepius has never called her that, but then he’s never looked older than he has at this moment. When she looks up at him, she sees his face is twisted in grief, and something about seeing her mentor stripped bare throws her into a panic.

“No,” Hore says, clutching Nico close to her, like her embrace alone can keep the Lord of the Dead away. “No no no _no_.”

“I know this can’t be easy, but it is his time,” Hades insists.

“It’s not his time!” she yells. “How could you know? All you do is end lives, snatching away futures while you sit on your throne and live forever! I won’t let you do that to him. Not now, not yet!”

“It’s not for you to decide who lives and who dies,” Hades tells her.

“And yet you do the same! Don’t you care about the lives you’re _ending_? Or do they not matter to a great and mighty god?”

“Persephone,” Asclepius says, “we must let him go.”

“No!” she clings tighter to Nicomachus, to the ebbing warmth of his body. “It was you who taught me to save lives, so I could _help people._  What good is all that if I can’t even help my best friend?”

“The Fates may not be kind, child, but their will must be obeyed.”

“He can’t. Have. Him.”

“Persephone…”

She folds herself over Nico, like her body alone can shield him from the Lord of the Dead, like she alone can keep him there, make sure she’ll see him laugh again and see his eyes go wide with excitement when he gets to record a new discovery or feel him huff when she nudges him for telling a stupid joke, or have his arms come around her in comfort--

She feels arms around her now -- it’s Asclepius, pulling her away gently, trying to soothe her though his own voice sounds wracked with grief.

“Please,” she says, “ _please_ let him live, Lord Hades. I’m _begging_ you.”

For a second, the god’s eyes land on her, and she thinks she sees a flicker of something in them -- pain, perhaps, maybe even kindness.

But then he looks away and says, “I’m sorry” again. He crouches over the clerk’s body, over her friend’s body, draws his soul forth and leaving a lifeless shell behind.

Kore feels a sob wrench from somewhere deep inside her, a sharp sense of _loss_ bludgeoning her. Hades looks at her once more, inclines his head in a quick bow.

She is enraged.

“His soul will know peace now,” the god assures her, and raises his arm, calling forth the shadows by which he travels.

And at that moment, she decides with cold, crystalline certainty that she will not let him do this. He cannot take her friend, he can’t take Nico and leave her alone with only memories to get by.

So when the shadows start to swirl around him, in that split second before he’d disappear in the blink of an eye, she pulls free from Asclepius’ grasp -- and lunges right towards him.

*

For a second, she is nothing. That’s what it seems. Kore feels like each atom of her being has been rent apart, scattered to distant corners of the cosmos to drift ceaselessly, fading into oblivion. It’s nothing like the gentle rush or traveling with her mother, or the slight turbulence of phasing in and out of places with Asclepius. She is nothing.

And then, suddenly she isn’t. All her scattered atoms seem to rush back at once, with blinding speed. Kore gasps, like her lungs have only just begun to work again, and for a second, there is only pain, an excruciating, unimaginable _pain_. And then she blinks awake, feeling unsteady, but reassuringly solid once more.

“What,” growls Hades, looming above her, “have you _done_ ?”

The god’s eyes are wide with panic as he stares down at her. Gods are not easily stunned, but by the looks of it, he is.

“I want you to let Nicomachus go,” she says, with confidence she does not entirely feel.

Hades laughs, a short incredulous sound that doesn’t sound much like amusement. “He’s already gone, Earth Princess. His soul was bound for the river the second we entered the Underworld.”

 _The Underworld_. The words settle on her like cold rain, the enormity of what she’s done only now beginning to dawn. She’s entered the world of the dead. It’s not somewhere most gods are ever meant to venture. Kore swallows past the uncertainty, the dread.

“I want my friend back.”

Hades groans, casting his eyes upwards in exasperation. For a second, the gesture makes him look startlingly youthful. “I don’t think you paid attention, _Princess_. He’s gone. Even if you manage to identify his soul from the _millions_ that wander here, he won’t remember you.”

“What do you mean? In case you’ve forgotten, Nico was  _with_ me not an hour ago. Before you turned up and killed him!”

“I did not kill him and you know it, Princess. His time had come. And by now, his memories of his earthly life will have been burned away.”

“How? How is that possible?”

Hades glares at her. “You know nothing about the Underworld, do you? And yet you took it upon yourself to dive in here headfirst like it’s another one of your mother’s fields for you to frolic in.”

“I came here for my _friend,_ ” she spits at him, “who you took.”

“Well your friend will have done what all souls must do upon entering the Underworld,” Hades snarls, “he will have drunk from the Lethe so that his memories of his mortal life have been eradicated in preparation for his judgment.”

When he will face the judges of the Underworld and his soul will be consigned to one location where he must dwell for all eternity. Where the sum of his entire life, all his experiences, will be reduced to one sentence amongst millions doled out by three Underworld spirits who don’t even know him.

He’s gone. Nicomachus is gone.

Kore feels her throat close and her eyes sting at the thought, but she refuses to give Hades her tears. He’s already taken too much. She pulls herself upright, looking the god straight in the eye.

“It seems I’m done here,” she tells him.

“So it does.”

_Do not cry. Do not cry. Do not cry._

“I’d like to go home now.”

Hades regards her for a second, before laughing. “I’m sure you would, Earth Princess.”

Her hands curl into fists by her side. “When you’re done mocking a mourning woman, would you please show me how to leave.”

The god smirks, but his eyes harden. “Ah yes, how to leave. I can guide you right towards the convenient passage in and out _of hell_ that everyone knows about.” When Kore doesn’t respond, he rolls his eyes. “What, did you really think it was so simple? That you could come and go as you like? Don’t you think if it was then everyone and their mother would be battering down my gates each day, demanding to see their dead relatives and trying to smuggle them back out?”

“You seem to go back-and-forth with no trouble.”

“ _I_ go where I need to to do my _job_ ,” he hisses, moving towards her. “I am bound by sacred duty to gather the souls of the dead and bring them to my realms,” he says, striding so close to her that she has to stagger back to keep some distance between them. “I told you I was sorry for your loss and I am. But loss is the price you pay for attachment to mortals, the same as everyone else. Same as every mortal left to grieve a loved one who is lost to them forever. You have the arrogance of an immortal, and you’ve already used it to try flout divine order and follow me here. You can’t honestly think that after all that, I’m just going to ferry you _back_?”

“You already got me here,” she splutters, “what difference would it make if you took me back?”

Hades gives that laugh of his again, that flat, humourless thing as cold as one of the corpses he leaves in his wake. “What _difference_ would it make? If any of the millions upon millions of anguished souls I preside over caught wind of me handing out free rides back to the living? You’re funny, princess.”

Kore blinks. She swallows down a mounting sense of panic, digging her fingernails into her palms and hoping the pain will steady her nerves. “Do you... you can’t seriously expect to keep here to languish forever.”

He scoffs, rolling his eyes at her. “That’s exactly what I should do if only to teach you a lesson. But don’t worry, I have no interest in cohabiting with Demeter’s darling princess for the rest of eternity.”

“And I have no wish to spend the rest of my days trapped in darkness with only _you_ for company,” she spits out, “so could you just tell me how to _get_. _Out_?”

“Well that’s simple,” he snorts. “You ask your father.”

“What?”

“In case you missed it, my dear brother is the King of the gods. If you want safe passage back to your realms, that’s within his powers to grant you.”

“So you expect me to just...wait around here until my father answers my prayers?”

“That’s about the sum of it, yes.”

“You can’t just… that’s completely...I can’t believe you!”

“Well,” Hades snaps his fingers, and out of nowhere an attendant appears, bowing low. “While you work out a way to move past that, Macar here will show you to a spare chamber.”

“Why do you even have spare chambers? Get many _guests_ down here, do you?”

“I suggest you start praying now, Princess, or you’ll become all too well-acquainted with the Underworld’s hospitality.” Hades nods at the attendant, saying “thank you, Macar,” and turns for one of the doors.

“Where are you _going_?” she demands.

He raises a hand in a mocking farewell without looking back at her. “The only place I could possibly go after the day I’ve just had. To have a drink.”

*

Kore couldn’t have told you what she’d have imagined a guest chamber in Hell looked like, but this certainly isn’t it.

“My lady,” Macar says with a bow, opening guiding her into a high-ceilinged spacious room, furnished with a huge ebony bed, a gilt-framed mirror hung on the walls. It’s There is a low dressing table, covered in silver-handled combs and ruby studded hairpins. Perfume bottles with ornate gold stoppers are lined up along one edge of it.

“This is all… very impressive,” is all Kore can think to say.

Macar nods. He looks wizened, with his grey beard and vein-riddled hands, but that belies the swiftness of his movements. “All the wealth of the Underworld is at the disposal of our craftsmen. The furnishings here are finer than anything you would find in the land of the living.”

“Um. Thank you.”

Macar bows again, backing out of a room, and then she’s alone. Alone in the Underworld.

She slumps on the bed, nothing about the situation quite seeming to register as real. She is alone in the Underworld. There is no way out.

And Nicomachus is dead.

_Nico._

Kore curls in on herself, as though huddling into the smallest ball possible can keep the despair from overtaking her. The awful irony is that he’d always been the only person capable of softening the blow she felt each time she encountered death. And now he’s gone and there is nothing soft left. She thinks of the earnest furrow of his brow as he’d scribble notes with his quill, as serious and committed to his role as a clerk as she was to hers as a healer.

 _Some healer_ , she thinks, _I couldn’t even save my friend_.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers into the darkness like somehow, Nico’s soul might hear her, “I’m so so sorry.”

No one answers. Even the wind doesn’t whisper a reply. There’s no sound at all, in fact, save the quieted muffles of her sobs that continue sounding through the night until she falls asleep.

*

There’s no sunlight to wake her up in the morning, but someone has been into her room and lit all the oil lamps hung from the walls. She rubs her eyes against the unfamiliar brightness, sitting upright. There’s a moment of dizzying disorientation as she looks around and sees obsidian walls and oxblood drapes instead of her light, airy chambers at home. It all comes back to her in a rush -- Hades, the Underworld, Nico…

It’s worse somehow, waking up and knowing for sure he’s gone. He won’t be there to throw pebbles at her window, to joke and whisper with her while she works. Not today, not ever again. Kore kneads the heels of her palms into her eyes, inhaling slowly. She refuses to give in to tears again. Right now, the only thing she has time to think about is getting out of the Underworld, and to do that, she must pray.

She rifles around the drawers of the room until she finds a bundle of incense. It’s not as good as a sacred fire would be, but for now, it will have to do. Kore doesn’t have food at hand to offer in sacrifice, so she summons a handful of oak leaves and acorns in honour of Zeus’ sacred tree -- relieved that her powers still have some muster here in Hell -- and clears a space on the dressing table. It takes some fidgeting around to light the incense and burn the leaves with one of the oil lamps, but once she manages it, she sits cross-legged with her eyes shut and tries to focus.

“Most glorious of Immortals, mighty God,

Invoked by many a name, O sovereign King

Of universal Nature, piloting

This world in harmony with Law,—all hail!”

She wets her lips as she recites the hymn. “Great Sky Father, hear my prayer. I beseech your clemency and your aid. I ask for safe passage from the Underworld back to the realms of the living, back to the reaches of the skies which you command, back to the fields of my mother’s kingdoms.”

Her mind reaches for more words, anything to increase the potency of her prayer.

“Please, father,” is what she settles on eventually. “ _Help me_.”

She prays as long as she can bear to kneel on the cold ground, but the restlessness overtakes her soon enough, and she pads outside of the room. It’s hard to get her bearings out of the palace she’s in, all the smooth walls and long corridors confusingly similar, but when she does, she finally gets her first look at the Underworld.

It’s… not what she expected.

For one thing, it’s huge, it’s vastness obvious even just from standing on the threshold of the palace. There are open plains on all sides. There’s no real _sky_ down here, of course, but there is some sort of expanse of _openness_ above, filtering greyish light onto the land below. It looks like an overcast day might back in the world above, but there’s still a strangeness to it somehow. She can tell, somehow, that this place has never been warmed by the sun or cooled by the rain.

Still, it isn’t _ugly_ by any stretch, or even particularly harrowing. Kore can see a river glinting in the distance, even the outlines of craggy hills and boulders. There are trees too. Nothing like the lush green thatches of her mother’s orchards -- these are spindly, skeletal looking things with bone-white bark and no leaves. She shivers inadvertently.

And then, there are the sounds. There’s the constant rush of whispers in the air, a sibilant rush of voices ever-present around her. Every so often, however, the whispers start to swell, and then crescendo into _moans_. It’s a terrible noise, thousands of anguished voices howling in discordant unison. By some strange magic, the sounds seem to come from _inside_ her head the moans edging into shrieks and striking her marrow-deep with an unbearable sense of despair that she can’t explain, that seems too much for one person -- even ten, a hundred people -- to bear. All she can do is clap her hands over her ears, screwing her eyes shut and hunching in on herself. Waiting for the moans to abate.

Kore would ask someone about it, but there isn’t exactly a plethora of friendly faces at hand. There are black-cloaked attendants from Hades' retinue, striding briskly from here to there, always rigid with purpose. Every so often, one or two of them come by herding along a group of souls. There are oreads and naiads too, from the Underworld’s landscape -- all just as pretty but far less languid and high-spirited as their world-above counterparts.

Still, ghoulish moans and emaciated trees and all, Kore can only explore so long before she goes from restless to _bored._ She’s never gone so long without having anyone to talk to, without having something to _do_ , and it sits poorly with her.

“Excuse me,” she says when she finally manages to flag down one of the attendants.

The attendant doesn’t speak, simply eyes her suspiciously, like she’s a prisoner somewhere she’s not supposed to be. Which may be somewhat true.

“Sorry to interrupt you,” she says, a little uncertain, “but would you know what there is for me to do around here?”

The attendant stares blankly at her. “The Underworld doesn’t provide entertainment for guests.”

“Oh,” she mutters. “Thank you anyway.”

Kore mills around some more, drifting back and forth from the palace to the grounds outside, before finally her boredom is only slightly abated by her hunger. It dawns on her very quickly that she hasn’t eaten anything since yesterday morning, and once she realises, she can’t _stop_ thinking about it. She searches every floor of the palace for a kitchen but finds nothing. Each room seems more ornately decorated than the next, but none of them appear to have any provisions for food. Which, in all fairness, ought not to be particularly surprising for a palace of the _Dead_.

Deciding against attempting to get any more help from the palace attendants, she ventures back outside. Kore doesn’t really know what she expects to find as she ambles further and further away from the palace, further into the expanse of the Underworld than she had all morning. She’s all but given up when finally, _finally_ , perhaps in answer to some subconscious prayer she’d been making, or by an unusually kind trick of the Fates, she stumbles on an orchard.

“Gods…” she mumbles as she sees it. In all fairness, it’s too small to perhaps fairly be called an orchard, so much as a copse of trees. But _still_. Of all the parts of the Underworld she’s seen so far, this is the only that seems as lush or _alive_ as anything above. Perhaps even moreso. The trees are short, so short the lowest branches almost brush the top of her head, but the trunks are solid and the canopies are full and green. The grass around them is a perfect emerald circle, soft and springy compared to the withered growth on the rest of the Underworld ground.

And then there are the fruits.

They seem to burst forth from every tree, so many of them that Kore marvels that the boughs don’t break with the weight. They’re jewel-bright too, apples and pears, pomegranates and guavas, olives and lychees, and scores of others even she can’t name. They’re brighter and fuller and riper than anything Kore thinks she could grow or summon. And suddenly, they’re the most enticing meal she’s ever seen. The growl in her stomach seems to turn into a roar, and she’s reaching out for a mango before she can think about it. Kore snaps it from the tree, eyes closing in pleasure at its intoxicating aroma. She makes short work of the peel, tearing at it with her thumbnails, until finally, _finally_ , she raises it to her mouth--

Only to have it knocked unceremoniously out of her hands and onto the ground.

“Just what,” Hades growls, “do you think you’re _doing_?” He looks livid, jaw clenched and chest heaving with rage. His hair, Kore notes with a start, is not slicked back today. Instead, it sits loose around his face in glossy black curls. Without warning, he grabs her wrist and starts marching off back towards the palace.

“What is your problem?” she demands, trying to wrench her hand away from him. It’s a futile endeavour; his grasp is iron. “Are you honestly reacting this way over a damned _mango_?”

He doesn’t answer, just keeps striding with the force of a madman until they’re back in the front courtyard of the palace.

“Will you let me _go_!” she cries.

Finally seeming to hear her, he releases her wrist, but only so he can back her into the wall and loom right over her.

“Gods above I knew you were petulant but I didn’t think you were such an idiot!” he hisses.

“What did you just say to me?!”

“You’re supposed to be trying to get _out_ of here!

“Well, why else do you think I spent the entire morning on my knees?” She flushes. “ _Praying?_  It wasn’t for fun!”

“So do you want to explain what the Hell you were doing trying to taste the fruit of the Underworld?”

“Well excuse me for trying to eat a _mango_ because I was _hungry_! I didn’t realise that was some kind of unforgivable sin down here.”

He laughs that mirthless laugh she’s quickly coming to hate, raking a hair through his loose curls. “Unforgivable sin -- you know, each time I think I get just how little you know about this place you prove me wrong. There really are no limits to your ignorance, are there?”

“In case you haven’t noticed, you literally spend your days in _Hell._  You’ll forgive me if it’s not a place I’ve spent my days dreaming about for fun!”

“In case you’ve forgotten, Earth Princess, you decided to come down here. Actually no, you _forced_ your way down here, flouting every nature order and divine law there is! So whilst I can see that clearly, obeying rules isn’t exactly high on your list of priorities, I feel like I should warn you that round here, breaking the rules means you face _consequences_ , unlike in your doubtless charmed existence in the world above.”

“You can mock me from being from _the world above_ all you want, Lord Hades. But you know what I think?”

“Why do I get the feeling you’re about to delight me with your no doubt sparkling insight?”

“I think you’ve spent your entire miserable existence festering in the darkness like an overgrown bat, doing nothing but _killing people_ and ruining lives, and you can’t stand the idea that some people don’t get off on spreading pain and heartbreak wherever they go!”

It’s that smirk again, that hard-edged silver drachma smirk that makes her blood run cold. “Well, _Princess_. If my lifestyle is so repulsive to you, I feel like it’s only fair to warn you that eating the food of the Underworld condemns you to stay here forever. It’s ancient magic, the kind that not even Zeus’s will could overturn. And you and your pretty little mouth were about to trip right into it.”

“You couldn’t have just _said_ that?” she sputters. “In your little spiel about praying my way out of here, include a mention of the cursed Hell fruit?”

“How was I supposed to know you’d go _seeking out_ the fruits of the Underworld?”

“I didn’t _seek them out_ , I found them by accident and tried to eat one because I was _hungry_. Besides, why do you even have an orchard of magical cursed fruit that no one is supposed to eat? Who the hell does that!?”

Hades scoffs, turning away in exasperation, leaving Kore to scramble behind him into the palace.

“Just do us both a favour and try to keep out of trouble,” he says. He stops short in front of a large set of double doors at the end of the hall. He waves a hand and they swing open in front of him. He gestures irritably for Kore to follow him in.

“What is this, some kind of dungeon?” she grouses.

“Would you just get inside,” he huffs.

She shoulders her way in past him, deliberately elbowing him in the stomach -- and stares.

There’s a long table stretched out in front of her, a _dining_ table laid with food: cuts of meat, bowls of goats cheese, bunches of grapes.

“What is this?” she asks, sounding a little gormless even to her own ears.

Behind her, Hades heaves a sigh. “It’s _lunch,_  Princess.”

“You... you quite literally _just_ told me not to eat the food of the Underworld on pain of being sentenced to waste away here unto eternity or whatever.”

The god takes a step to come stand in front of her, apparently specifically so that he can shoot her a withering glance. “Yes, Princess, I did. Now, I’ve brought you to a meal that consists of food summoned from above that you and your delicate stomach can consume without the threat of eternal damnation.”

She eyes the spread, still suspicious.

Hades pulls out one of the chairs and flops down into it, leaning back so the chair balances on its two back legs. His curls -- it’s so _jarring_ , seeing him without the slicked-back hair -- dance a little at his forehead. He looks in that moment more like a sullen youth than an all-powerful god.

“Think about it, Princess,” he says, leaning forward to pluck a handful of grapes from the stem, popping a few in his mouth. “Firstly, the only person less eager than you to have you haunt these halls forever is _me_. Secondly, even if I had temporarily taken leave of my senses and decided I did, in fact, wish to hold on to the pleasure of your company _forever_ , why the hell would I go to the trouble of stopping you from eating the cursed mango -- a trap which you were falling into of your own sweet accord, by the way -- and then immediately leading you to another more elaborate meal that serves the exact same purpose? Explain to me what the logic in that would be?”

Kore doesn’t answer right away. Hades shrugs, kicks his feet up on the table -- just to be obnoxious, she thinks -- and plops another grape into his mouth.

“ _Fine_ ,” she gripes eventually. But the first thing she eats is the grape she snatches right out of Hades’ hands.

*

It’s peculiar, how quickly she falls into some semblance of a routine. Each morning, she dedicates to prayer. It’s hard to tell whether it’s working or not -- Zeus is in receipt of a million prayers each day, and it’s only the faint hope that he’s at all attuned to her, one of his many children, that gives Kore any cause to believe he might hear her.

After that, she’ll eat in the hall, sometimes with Hades, sometimes without, depending on where his schedule takes him. She finds, absurdly, that she envies him. She envies his always having something to do, some job to attend to. She hadn’t realised the extent to which her work with Asclepius had occupied her until now, when all those skills are rendered useless and there is no work to be done. All Kore can do is half-heartedly wander the Underworld. And there’s a lot of it to wander. Kore gets the sense that it’s as big as the world above, every bit as vast. There are five rivers, she learns. The Styx, she knows -- it’s the largest of them, coiling its way round and round the Underworld like a great black serpent. Hades gruffly warns her not to go near it, but she has no desire to -- all she knows of the Styx is that the gods make their most solemn vows in its name. It’s no lazy brook to dip her feet into, that much is clear. Then there’s the Acheron, by which the ferryman Charon carts boatloads of souls into the Underworld (“I thought you were the one that brought souls here!” Kore interjects. Hades rolls his eyes. “I bring them as far as the gates, Princess. Charon’s the one who brings them across the river. Obviously.” She scowls at him. “I think you and I have different definitions of what is _obvious_ ), and the milky white Lethe, that brings a lump to her throat each time she thinks of Nicomachus drinking from it. The Cocytus, it turns out, is the source of the awful wails and moans that echo throughout the land each day. She hasn’t seen it, but when she tersely asks Hades about the sounds, he tells her that it’s the souls whose bodies had been left without a proper burial. They’re made to wander the banks of The Wailing River forever. Kore can’t help a pang of sadness whenever she hears the wails now. And then, of course, there’s the Phlegethon. Of all the rivers, it looks the most unassuming. But Macar warns her that it flows right into the depths of Tartarus, the deepest pit of the Underworld, and with a shudder, Kore resolves to steer clear of it.

And while the rivers are bad, she doesn’t find the rest of the Underworld much better.

Ever since the cursed fruit, she’s wary of anything that looks too beautiful. And the fact is, some things she sees are _very_ beautiful -- the Underworld is, after all, home to all the earth’s riches. There are caves filled with jewels -- sapphires, rubies, emeralds, diamonds -- of such size and luster she wonders that Olympus isn’t envious. Gold and silver seem to grow from trees and spill from the pools; statues of black marble are wrought in far finer a craftsmanship than any Kore has seen in the world above.

Still, there’s only so long she can spend marveling at the trinkets. One day, when the boredom becomes unbearable yet again, she decides to see the gates for herself. By now, Kore has begrudgingly accepted that she won’t exactly just be _walking_ out of hell. But there’s no harm in sightseeing, she reasons.

Only this is the Underworld, so,  _of course,_ there’s harm in it. She should have seen that coming.

What she could not have _seen_ was that in this case, the ‘harm’ appears to come in the shape of the largest dogs she’s ever seen. Kore barely makes it near the great gates that stand at the entrance of the Underworld, just near enough to make out their outline, when three huge, snarling dogs leap forth from the shadows planting themselves in front of her.

No. Not three dogs. _One_ dog, with three huge, monstrous heads erupting from a single, colossal body. The dog growls at her, preparing to pounce. When it bears its teeth at her, Kore becomes suddenly very conscious of that fact that whilst immortals cannot die, they can feel pain.

Dropping into a low, predatory stance, the dog pads forward one step, then another.

She can’t run, Kore knows instinctively, can’t give the dog a reason to give chase. It’d catch her in an instant. Taking a steadying breath, she holds her hands up in a defensive gesture. She hopes dogs understand supplicating gestures. She keeps her eyes trained on the floor, not letting any of its three pairs of eyes meet her own for fear of angering it.

The dog prowls another step closer. It’s close enough now that Kore can feel its breath down the back of her neck, hot and rancid.

“G-good boy,” she stammers, “nice d-d-dog.”

It growls again, and she closes her eyes, bracing for the moment her head gets bitten off.

Something warm and wet slops against her hands.

Slowly, slowly Kore opens one eye. One of the dog’s three heads hovers gaping above her, a tongue the size of a salmon lolling out.

“Are you going to eat me?” she asks it.

In response, the dog licks her, first with one head, then another, and then another.  
The slobber _soaks_ her. She can feel her hair sticking to her head, damp with drool.

Kore giggles.

She reaches up, scratching under one of its jaws. The dog flops to his stomach, all its heads panting while his great tail wags happily back and forth, generating such a strong breeze she can feel it on her face.

“You’re not scary at all, are you?” she says, rubbing its heads, scratching behind each of its ears. “No, you’re a good boy, aren’t you? _Good boy_!”

He licks her, all over her face, rolling over onto his back and barking happily when she scratches his stomach.

“What happened to you?” Hades drawls when she comes into dinner that evening, still covered in slobber. He’s not alone -- some of the attendants and other Underworld residents have joined him today. There are some Oreads, and Kore recognises the Naiad sat next to Hades as the one she and Nico had seen him with at the Summit.

“I met your dog,” she tells him cheerfully. “Talk about all bark and no bite, but I think he likes me.”

Hades sits up straighter in his chair, actually looking surprised for once. “You met _Cerberus_?”

“Is that his name?” Kore asks, helping herself to a cut of ham. “But yes. I played with him for a while.”

“You played with him.”

She can hear some of the other guests murmuring among themselves. Hades, for his part, is still staring at her, incredulous.

“That’s what I said.”

“You _played_ with Cerberus, guardian of the gates of Hell.”

Kore sniffs, imperious. “He’s a good dog.”

Hades doesn’t say anything after that, and the Naiad starts a conversation with him. But unless Kore’s imagining things, she thinks she sees the god of Death smiling a little into his bowl.

There are other guests at dinners most days after that. The Naiad -- whose name, Kore learns, is Minthe -- is a regular fixture, always claiming the seat immediately at Hades’ side. But there are others. The palace attendants always eat at the table with the guests. Kore sees Hades passing along dishes to them when their plates run empty. Kore exchanges pleasantries with some of them, makes idle conversation.

In spite of her best efforts, however, she can’t quite shake off the sense of loneliness. It’s begun to feel like some sort of glass sphere exists around her, thin and clear enough for her to see and hear the world around her, but a barrier nonetheless.

She hasn’t had a real _conversation_ in so long. Hades exchanges the odd barbed comment with her at meals, she’ll ask the person sat at the table next to her to pass her a glass at mealtimes. But Kore feels like she’s slowly shrinking in on herself, withering into nothing.

“Please, great cloud-gatherer,” she prays, “deliver me from this place. Return me to my home, sky-father, almighty Lord Zeus.”

Her prayers seem to fall on deaf ears.

She wanders back to the orchard of cursed fruit, not to eat any, but just to look at something pretty enough to distract her for a while. She plays with Cerberus, burying her face into the hellhound’s fur and letting him nuzzle her. It helps, but only for a few hours.

Kore begins to think that perhaps it’s appropriate she’s stuck in the Underworld because she’s beginning to feel like a ghost. Isn’t that what she is, drifting around in this strange place where no one really knows her?

Perhaps that’s why one afternoon she makes her way down to the banks of the Cocytus. The wailing has been especially loud that day, piercing and desolate. For some reason, that day it only makes her curious, awakens a sort of sympathy in her.

Kore hadn’t really known what to expect from the River of Wailing. At first glance, it looks like any river from the world above, a flowing ribbon of grey-green water shrouded in mist, weeping willows hanging above.

It’s only when she gets closer that she realises it’s not mist -- it’s _souls_ , hundreds of them meandering aimlessly, passing by each other, _through_ each other. And each one wails, howls in agony, a cacophonous chorus of grief.

She steps closer, so she’s standing in the midst of the souls. Some of them seem to swirl around her, a miniature cyclone. They can’t touch her or even seem to see her exactly. But something about the despairing spirits around her is strangely comforting. She closes her eyes, letting their wails wash over her for a moment before she starts to hum. It’s a simple tune, an old lullaby she used have sung to her as a child. Kore doesn’t think it has many effects at first, but slowly, the wails start to subside. They’re not silent by any stretch, only lulled a little. But it is better. And for those few moments, there’s a solace in the fact that even if there’s no one to comfort her, Kore can bring a little comfort to the untethered souls that haunt the Cocytus.

*

The next day, Kore is playing with Cerberus, tossing sticks for each of his heads to catch, when she hears a rumble of thunder. Automatically, she glances upwards to check how close the storm clouds are, and then she remembers.

There is no sky down here.

She sprints back to the palace, out-of-breath by the time she burst into the hall. Hades appears seconds after she does, phasing into the room from a swirl of shadows.

“What’s going on?” she asks him. “Did you hear--”

“Why do you think I’m here, Princess?” he asks grimly. He looks at her. “If that’s what I think it is, then I’d guess we’re being graced by the presence of my beloved brother.”

Kore bites her lip, nervous. If Zeus is here, he must have heard her prayers.

“I guess this is it,” she says, not looking at the god next to her. “He must be sending me back.”

Hades huffs a laugh. “Took him long enough. I’m getting tired of being his childminder.”

“I’ve been minding _myself_ just fine, thanks.” Kore scowls.

Any response is swallowed up in the sudden flash of lightning that pierces the room. Kore has to look away until the light dissipates enough to reveal the King of the gods, or at least a shimmery mirage of him, towering fifteen feet above them.

“Brother,” Hades says without preamble, “nice of you to drop in. You’re looking well. And so understated, too.”

“Hell hasn’t dulled your sense of humour I see,” Zeus says, voice icy. His gaze fixes on Kore, and she drops quickly to a bow.

“Father,” she says, “you’ve heard my prayers.”

“Yes.” The sky god examines her a moment longer. “It’s quite the trap you’ve ensnared yourself in, Persephone.”

“I know,” she says, keeping her eyes carefully lowered. “And I-- I apologise.”

“I’m ready to wash my hands of her, brother,” Hades says, “return her to her mother and let us be done with this.”

Zeus’ expression hardens. “Yes, that would be the happiest ending to this whole travesty, would it not? All the pieces placed neatly back where they belong.”

“Enough with your riddles, Zeus,” Hades snaps, “take the girl back and put and end to this.”

The god-King’s mouth curls into a cruel-edged smile. “I would. Were it not for the fact that word has spread to just about every living creature under the sun about you two disappearing into the depths of the Underworld together.”

“For the record,” Hades says, “it was not _together_. She pounced on me.”

“Yes,” Zeus snaps, “thanks to Persephone’s prayers I am well aware that your power was manipulated and divine authority flouted by a girl. And do you know what it means when _your_ authority is called into question, _brother_?” he spits the word like an insult. “It is a blight on all of us! You, me and Poseidon are the eldest children of Kronos, we are the oldest and mightiest of the gods.”

“You don’t think you’re overselling us a little, brother?” Hades asks drily.

“Is this a joke to you!?” Zeus rages. “We three are the greatest symbols of the divine authority of the gods! If I return just return Persephone to the above world like I’m dropping her back from some jaunt, then it is an admission to the entire world that your divine authority, the greatest power of the gods, was flouted by a _girl._

“Father I’m sorry,” she whispers, “I didn’t mean--”

“It doesn’t matter what you meant!” Zeus roars. Hades grabs her wrist and shoots her a warning glance. “What matters,” Zeus continues “is doing what we can to preserve the image of the gods. Our course of events must leave no doubt in the minds of the world that the authority of Olympus -- and the power of all the elder gods -- is strong, stronger than ever.”

“What are you going to do?” Kore asks, anxiety coiling in the pit of her stomach.

The sky god fixes a stare on Hades, smiling coldly. “Fortunately for us all, I have been cleaning up your mess ever since word of Persephone’s little jaunt into Hell first reached me. For one thing, I have assigned Demeter to go visit some distant islands on business for a while so that she doesn’t notice the absence of her darling daughter for a while longer. For another, I have quelled most reports that say this girl simply hijacked the power of the gods to travel to the Underworld on a whim by offering an, ah, _alternate explanation_.”

“Well don’t keep us in suspense,” Hades grits out, “what did you say?”

Zeus grins. “I said that they ought to offer you congratulations on your upcoming nuptials.”

Kore blinks, not understanding right away.

Her father continues to talk. “It’s no secret that my daughter is something of a beauty. Word of the golden-haired goddess who plays in Demeter’s fields has already reached many corners of the world. I simply explained that rumours of her beauty had also reached my brother down in Hell, and eventually, he grew so curious he ventured to the world above in his chariot. Upon spying her playing in the fields, so overcome was he by her beauty that he instantly seized her for himself, carried her away to the Underworld, and made her his bride.”

All pretense of amusement has vanished from Hades’ face. “Well good job on spinning your lies,” he hisses, “now take her back.”

“You know full well I can’t do that,” Zeus says, a deadly calm overtaking him. “How are we supposed to inspire a continued awe of the gods if everyone believes that the great and terrible Hades simply _lets_ someone wander into the Underworld and walk off with his wife?”

“I don’t _have_ a wife,” Hades snaps.

“No,” Zeus nods slowly, “not yet.”  

The implication behind his words hangs heavy in the silence for a moment.

“Father,” Kore can hear the mounting desperation in her own voice, “please. No. _No_ \--”

“You’re not serious,” Hades sounds incredulous, “do you honestly think you can come into my realms and command me to _marry_?”

Zeus’s mirage flickers so that suddenly, it’s normal-sized, but looming right in Hades' face. “Do not forget that I am your king. You allowed your authority to be compromised and you are now duty bound to do what must be done in order to preserve the reputation of the gods.”

“Father please!” Kore cries, “I don’t want to wed, please, I swear I’ll say whatever you want me to about why I’m here, just please don’t make me _marry_ him--”

“You will do as you are told!” Zeus roars, “be glad I’m giving you to an elder god in marriage, for you could do a lot worse by way of a husband -- I could have you confined to Tartarus for what your impudence has lead us to!”

“I won’t let you force me to wed,” Hades snaps, “you cannot make me--”

“No?” Zeus snarls, “can’t I? Can’t I confine the souls of the dead to wander the world above forever, so that your realms grow emptier by the day? Can’t I order that the gates of Hell be torn down and all its inhabitants be forced to wander the world untethered, without home or protection? Can’t I do all that and more if you _dare_ defy my authority?”

His words ring, deafening.

Kore feels a heavy, inescapable sense of dread settle over her.

When Zeus speaks again, he sounds calmer, more collected. “Summon all your subjects, Hades,” he says, “throw a grand feast. Decorate with all the wealth of the Underworld.” Zeus gestures at Kore. “You will wed her, and everyone will know it. In the eyes of the Underworld, and of the world above, you will be man and wife. Beyond that, you may do what you want. Imprison her, ignore her,” Zeus smirks cruelly, “fuck her. Whatever you want. But first, there will be a wedding.”

The mirage starts to fade, and the god king waves a hand their way. “Run along now, you two. You have a wedding to plan.”

*

In the world above, wedding celebrations take three days. Down here, where the bride has no family and Zeus has commanded the couple be wed as soon as possible, they skip straight to the _gamos_ \-- the wedding day. A flurry of female attendants wakes Kore in the morning. They bathe her, scrub her skin raw, douse her in fragrance and arrange her hair into an elaborate crown of braids. A red veil is pinned into her blonde hair, obscuring her face. They pin her into a new peplos and drape a heavy embroidered cloak around her shoulders, before flanking her and guiding her out of the back of the palace.

The Underworld has more residents than she would have guessed -- hundreds of people wait to watch Kore’s procession arrive. The temple in the Underworld is simple, an unadorned structure of black marble, but today it has been festooned in flowers fashioned from beaten silver and gold. Hades stands inside, a small retinue of followers near him.

His hair isn’t slicked back for the occasion, Kore notes, his curls instead sit loose and glossy.

She’s _marrying_ him. The thought hits her like a punch to the gut each time. This severe, merciless god, who took her friend away. He’s going to be her _husband_.

The procession starts to fragment, all the attendants filing off to find seats. Kore swallows, makes her way all the way up to the altar where Hades stands. A hush falls across the room as she reaches him.

Hades reaches up and begins to carefully unpin the veil. Kore hardly dares move, painfully conscious of his hands working not a hair’s breadth from her face. If she moved he’d practically be caressing her.

The veil comes away in his hands and she’s looking straight up into his eyes. She wishes for a moment that she knew him better, at least enough to try to guess what he might be thinking. But she doesn’t and she might as well be staring at a wall for all she can fathom from him.

A priest brings forth a loutrophoros, singing a hymn the whole while, and gestures for Hades to hold out his hands. The priest tips some holy water from the loutrophoros into Hades’ cupped hands and nods. Hades looks at Kore, and she closes her eyes as he pours the water over her head. She feels it run in cool rivulets through her hair, down her face, droplets catching in her lashes. Kore can practically feel the stature of her groom, can feel the heat from his chest where he stands right in front of her.

The priest turns to her, and she takes some water in her own hands. The priest recites a blessing as he sets the loutrophoros down. Hades has to bend down for her to be able to reach and pour the water over his head. She watches as it catches in his curls when he straightens up.

“With a kiss, I proclaim you both married,” the priest says.

Kore tenses. She knew this was coming, but still.

Hades looks at her. For permission, she realises.

For a second, she wants to shake her head and shove him away, run off in the opposite direction. But she knows she can’t, so she simply nods.

Hades leans down, presses his lips to hers. It’s only a brief kiss, a peck for show. She can taste a drop of holy water on his mouth. He pulls away, and the priest congratulates them, and the guests cheer.

They are married.

There is a feast then, tables laden with hams and swans and roast beef, goblets of wine and nectar, bowls of fruit and mountains of bread. “The ham is safe for you,” Hades murmurs next to her, “so is the bread. And the apples.”

She nods, helping herself to some of each. But she can’t do more than pick at it, her appetite ruined with the realisation that by now it probably doesn’t matter what she eats. She can never leave this place.

Hades doesn’t speak to her for the rest of the meal, choosing instead to speak to well-wishers in low tones, or else to survey the scene in silence. It’s only when the feasting winds down that he stands, goblet of wine in hand. The guests fall silent when they see their Lord preparing to speak.

“Thank you all for coming,” Hades begins. He doesn’t raise his voice, doesn’t have to -- his is the kind of tone that naturally commands attention. “This is a joyous day indeed. I have been joined in a marriage to a beloved wife,” he gives Kore a warm, smile that no outsider could tell was fake, “and Hell has been given a new Queen.” He holds a hand out to her and Kore takes it, willing her legs to hold her upright, hoping Hades cannot feel how her hands tremble.

Hades raises his goblet. “A toast,” he says, “to the Queen of the Underworld!”

“To the Queen of the Underworld,” echo the mourners.

Kore takes a long drink.

The priest steps forward. “Your majesties,” he says, “it is time.”

Hades nods, and Kore swallows. She’s been trying not to think about what comes next.

The priest leads them past the lines of standing guests and back into the palace. It’s a wing she hasn’t seen before. They stop before a huge set of carved double doors.

“If your majesties would please kneel...”

They both lower themselves to the ground. The priest lays one hand on each of their heads, and murmurs a hymn to Hera. A prayer for a fruitful marriage.

“Congratulations to you both,” he says when they stand again. “My lord. My lady.” He bows, and walks away.

Kore’s palms feel slick; she wipes them down on her skirt.

Hades holds the door open for her, and she walks in after a second’s hesitation. She hears the door shut as Hades follows her in, and then that’s it. She’s alone. Alone with her husband.

Kore takes in the room. It’s Hades’ personal chambers, and she can’t deny being a little curious. It’s neat, and sparsely furnished. Aside from the decadent curtains and ornate wall sconces, there’s not much decoration. The desk is the only part of the room that really looks used -- it’s a mess of papers and scrolls, a stump of a candle stood in one corner. The dresser is laden with what Kore can only assume are their wedding presents, various chests and amphorae and crates spilling over with coins and jewels.

“I don’t have a dowry,” is what she says eventually, breaking the silence.

“What?”

“I think now is when I’d be expected to present my dowry. If we were marrying in the world above, that is. But my mother isn’t here. And I don’t think my father was exactly offering up anything, and I haven’t had much time to prepare--”

“Don’t worry about it,” Hades says cutting off her rambling. “I don’t need a dowry.”

Kore nods, terse.

There’s silence again. Kore avoids looking at the bed in the middle of the room, though she swears it seems to grow larger with each passing second. She misses Nico so sharply it aches in that moment. The silences they worked in were never this fraught. Those were comfortable, companionable things, broken intermittently with chatter about any and everything. But there’ll be none of that now. Nicomachus is gone. Thanks to her new husband.

Hades clears his throat. “There is one thing I wanted to speak to you about.”

She looks at him warily.

“What would you like to be called?” he asks.

“My name is Persephone,” she blabs, confused.

Hades sighs. “Yes. But what would you _like_ to be called?”

She frowns. “My mother calls me Kore. Everyone else calls me Persephone. I don’t know what you’re asking.”

“You’ve noticed, haven’t you, that gods wear many names?”

She thinks about it. Apollo goes by Phoebus, Athena by Pallas, and she herself refers to Zeus as the sky father. It’s true the gods tend to string names and titles along like beads on a necklace. Kore has never really understood the practice, answering to both her names without really questioning it.

“We’re _old_ ,” Hades explains “we represent many facets, each of us. It’s impossible that simply one name is going to encapsulate all of that.”

“So you think I should have a new one?”

Hades shrugs. “If you want.”

She considers. ‘Persephone’ is a name that belongs in the world above, tangled as it with her time at the Summits, with people who know her as only her mother’s daughter. And ‘Kore’ has always been a name for her and her mother to use. It’s a child’s name. She does not like her new husband, but she can’t deny there’s sense in what she’s saying. Such names don’t seem to belong down here. They don’t suit an unwitting Queen of Hell, that much is sure. She looks at her hands.

“Do _you_ want a new name?” she asks.

Hades is quiet for so long, she doesn’t think he’s going to speak. When he does talk, it’s so quiet she has to strain to hear him. “Call me Bellamy.”

“Bellamy?” she tests the name out. “Why that one? What does it mean?”

“It’s in a language that’s not spoken yet,” he says, “I’ve had it chosen for a while. I’d always thought that --” he cuts himself off. “Anyway. I want you to call me Bellamy.”

He looks almost… sad as he says it. Soft, even. But he’s not. She may have to share a bed with him, hang on his arm like a trophy, be wed to him. But this is the god who reaped the soul of so many innocents while she watched. The one who snuffed out Nicomachus’ life like he was nothing, with no whisper of mercy to be had. She won’t forget that, won’t ever forget who it is she’s married to.

_I record whatever we discover to ensure we remember it, learn from it._

“I know what name I’d like,” she says, feeling it settle over her, a cold, sharp certainty.

Hades-- _Bellamy_ looks at her, expectant.

She holds her hand out for him to shake, as though meeting him for the first time. “Call me Clarke.”


	2. magic to make the sanest man go mad

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title and epitaph are from Homer's Iliad XIV. 216–217.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you SO MUCH for the response to chapter one -- it blew me away and honestly motivated me so much to write! I know this chapter feels like it took a long time coming, but trust me when I say I am in shock that I managed to get it up this quickly during term time (for context, I usually get absolutely NOTHING done during University time because there's literally no breathing room) but this is the most fun I've ever had writing a fic, so thanks so much for the support!
> 
> And on a further happy note, icmyi, Beliza got hitched!! I wish them the heartiest congratulations, and a marriage that is hopefully a darned sight smoother than the one you're about to witness. 
> 
> Finally, note the change in rating ;-)

 

 

> **_Ἔνθ' ἔνι μὲν φιλότης, ἐν δ' ἵμερος, ἐν δ' ὀαριστὺς_ **
> 
> **_πάρφασις, ἥ τ' ἔκλεψε νόον πύκα περ φρονεόντων_ **
> 
> _There is the heat of Love, the pulsing rush of Longing, the lover's whisper,_
> 
> _irresistible—magic to make the sanest man go mad_

 

The quiet in their bedchamber seems almost anticlimactic after the ceremonial proceedings that led them there. If Bellamy is perturbed at suddenly having to share his rooms with another person, he doesn’t show it, simply gestures at the various cupboards and shelves as if she can’t spot them for herself.

“That’s my workspace,” he tells her, indicating a broad stone table covered in various scrolls and papers. “If you require something similar to entertain yourself with, we can arrange to have one put in.”

“ _Entertain myself_?” she splutters, “what exactly do you imagine I’m going to be doing with my time?”

“I’m sure you’ll figure something out,” he says, stretching. “Meanwhile, I do still have a kingdom to run.”

She purses her lips together, trying not to give him the satisfaction of betraying her irritation. They lapse into silence, and the longer the quiet drags on, the bigger the bed seems to loom between them. It seems almost comically prominent all of a sudden, sat expectantly in the middle of the room. She becomes aware of every muscle in her body tensing as the realisation dawns on her.

_What now?_

“Has my beauty rendered you so very speechless?” Bellamy asks, and she instantly scowls, annoyed to have been caught staring at him.

“What are we-- what happens now?” she asks, forcing her voice to sound detached and steady.

He looks at her, face impassive. “What do you mean?”

“Well, since we-- traditionally when one is married, that means… the night--” she clamps her mouth shut, desperate to halt the onslaught of clumsy explanations she can feel building in her throat.

Bellamy raises an eyebrow, leaning forward from his chair to look at her. “Yes, princess?”

She huffs, slumping back in her seat and turning away. “Forget it.”

Clarke hears him get up. He crosses over, coming around to the back of her chair. When he leans down to speak, she can feel his breath caress the back of her neck.

“You mean am I going to take you to bed?” he asks, quietly.

She feels an involuntary shiver course down her spine in spite of herself.

“Are we going to, ah, _consummate_ our marriage? Join our bodies as we have our eternal souls?” He’s so close now his lips brush the shell of her ear with each word he speaks. Clarke feels strangely light-headed; she finds herself curling her hands into fists and digging her nails into her palm in the hope that the pricking pain will ground her.

For a long moment, Bellamy is perfectly still and perfectly silent, and Clarke can hardly bear the tension in the air as she waits for him to say something, _do something_.

Behind her, he snorts. His amusement shatters the heaviness of the moment and he wanders languidly over to the bed, chuckling. “Don’t look so scared,” he says, “I promise you I have more than my fair share of very eager partners if I’m looking to satiate any of _those_ particular appetites. I have no need of fumbling in the dark with a scared little girl.”

“You’re a _pig_ ,” she spits, almost paralysed with outrage for a moment, every fiber of her being seeming like it’s about to set alight with pure rage at the _audacity_ of the man, god, whoever he is that she’s just been tied to for life. “A sick, disgusting pig.”

“Few people know this, but pigs are highly intelligent creatures.”

“Well then I’ll remember to send the species my apologies for degrading them with an unfair comparison to such a cretin!”

“I’m sure it’s no worse for them than hearing their name mangled by the ceaseless shrieking of such a _harpy_.” He rolls over, tugging a pillow over his head.

For a while, Clarke is tempted to just stay in her chair, stewing in furing and refusing to lower herself by crawling into the bed where her _husband_ now sleeps, totally unconcerned. Eventually however, exhaustion overcomes her, and she crumples on top of the mattress, hoping the sweet oblivion of sleep will grant her reprieve from this hell -- this very literal _hell_ \-- for a few hours.

She wakes up curled on one side of the bed, asleep on top of the sheets.

Rolling over, she sees the other side is empty. Bellamy must be an early riser. Her clothes have already been moved into the room, and she dresses quickly, anxious not to spend any more time in the marital chambers than she needs to.

The palace seems to be new and strange all over again, any semblance of familiarity she’d built up over the past few weeks shattered again by the wedding.

Bellamy is already in the hall, consulting with one of his advisors. He looks up when he sees Clarke come in.

“Morning, wife.”

“Shut up.”

He rolls his eyes and turns back to the advisor. “Just give Charon what he wants. We can’t afford to have him strike again, the chaos takes millennia to fix. But don’t tell him we concede until preparations are made for the Cocytus. I’ll have to add reinforcements to its boundaries or we’ll be inundated with stray souls.”

She sits up at the mention of the Cocytus. “What’s going on?”  
“Underworld business,” Bellamy says dismissively, “nothing to do with you.”

Clarke tears off a piece of bread, irritated. Bellamy gets up and leaves the room a few moments later, still in deep conversation with the advisor.

She does her best to lapse back into her usual routine. Clarke counts it as a blessing if her husband’s going to ignore her. It’ll make it easier to pretend her doesn’t exist. But she doesn’t make it beyond the front gates of the palace before a guard hurries after her.

“My Lady,” he says, “please allow me to escort you back to your chambers.”

“There’s no need,” she says, “I’m heading out. But thank you.”

He clears his throat. “Excuse me, my lady. But I’ve been instructed to escort you back inside.”

Clarke narrows her eyes. “Instructed?”

“Your husband has ordered that we ensure you remain within the palace gates,” he says, having the grace to look somewhat abashed.

She stands ramrod straight. “What?”

The guard avoids eye contact. “Please come with me, my lady.”

Clarke curls her hands into fists. She’s being confined to her rooms like a _child_ , like her mother would have done. “My husband ordered this, did he?”

“Yes, my lady.”

“Did he give a reason?” she grits out.

The guard remains silent.

“I see. Where is he?”

“I’m unable to say, my lady.”

Clarke wants to punch something. Preferably her husband’s smug, freckled face.

“My lady?” the guard sounds somewhat alarmed, and tracing his gaze, Clarke realises a patch of nettles has sprung from the land between their feet.

She takes a steadying breath, stepping neatly to the side of the nettles. “Fine. Let’s go back.”

The guard looks relieved as he leads her back towards the palace. As soon as she’s inside, she storms back into the bedroom and slams the door behind her, not caring how much the gesture resembles a childlike tantrum.

Clarke is _fuming_. It was one thing for her mother to try control where she went and when. It’s another entirely for Bellamy -- whose stupid kingdom she’s stuck in against her own will -- to try do the same.

“ _Ugh_ ,” she picks up a pillow and hurls it against the door. She glowers at Bellamy’s desk, strewn with papers. In one angry, sweeping motion, she scatters the documents all over the floor in angry disarray. She kicks his chair over, then kicks the bed even though there’s no moving it.

She’s still angry, still full of pent-up rage that she needs to expound somewhere. Clarke storms out of the bedroom, looking for somewhere, _anywhere_ else to be. A glance out of the window show that guards have been stationed at all entrances to the palace (she’s going to _strangle_ Bellamy).

She almost does when she sees him at lunch. He walks in a little after she does, not even sparing her a glance.

“What the hell are you doing?” she demands.

“Eating,” he says.

“Fuck you! I mean why do you have your guard dogs keeping me locked in here like a pet?”  
“Trust me Princess, if I was choosing a pet, it wouldn’t be anything like you.”

“You can’t just lock me up--”

“Lock you up? I don’t see any chains, but that’s a tempting idea.”  
“You can’t just _lock me up_ and not tell me why!”

Bellamy takes a sip of water. “Yes. Yes, I can, and I have because down here, I’m King and I follow no one rules but my own.”

She scoffs. “Big talk from someone who was literally just forced into a loveless marriage because his brother made him!”

“Loveless?” Bellamy yawns, “damn, Princess, you’re breaking my heart.”  
“Stop calling me that!” she snaps. “Why did you bother asking me what name I wanted if you were just going to keep using that?”  
“Why did you stalk me into the Underworld if you were so eager to get out? Some mysteries remain unsolved, I suppose.”

“I hate you,” she says.

“Happily for everyone, the feeling is mutual.” Bellamy stands up, stretching.

“Where are you going?” Clarke demands. “You haven’t answered my question yet!”  
“I’m aware,” he says walking away, leaving Clarke to scurry after him.

“Just tell me why!” she yells as they make their way down the corridor.

“Fine.” Bellamy looks at her. “Unfortunately, you’re my wife now, my queen. Everything you do reflects directly on me. I don’t trust you not to show me up or try undermine me in the Underworld, so I want you here where you can’t cause any trouble.”

She gapes at him. “Are you serious? Are you _serious_?”

“I’m the god of Death, Clarke, I’m always serious,” he says opening the door to their bedroom.

He stares. “You’ve redecorated.”

Clarke feels a sharp satisfaction at his slightly alarmed expression. “I was angry. I still _am_.”

“My consort can’t be seen to throw tantrums like a petulant child,” he scoffs, “it makes a mockery of my authority.”

She wants to slap the smirk off his smug, stupid face. She wants to strike at the sculpted curves of his jaw, to bite on his petty, pretty mouth until it’s so swollen he won’t speak.

Clarke takes a steadying breath, curling her hands into fists. “Is abusing your kingly power honestly the only way you’re capable of keeping a woman in the bedroom?”

Maybe she imagines it, but Bellamy’s eyes seem to darken as he leans closer to her.

“Believe me, Princess, if I was trying to get you in my bed, you certainly wouldn’t be complaining.”

“You’re an _ass_ ,” she hisses, so angry she’s practically shivering.

“Yeah,” he stretches, stepping backwards smoothly.

“Fine,” she snaps, “I won’t trash any more of your palace. I’ll _behave_. Just let. Me. Out.”

Bellamy shoots her a withering glance and then gestures at the ground at his feet.

“You sure about that?”

She stares at where he’s pointing - a web of ivy has wound its way up his ankles, like a pair of shackles.

“I didn’t do that,” she says.

Her husband snorts, drawing a short sword from his belt and hacking unceremoniously at the vines. “Of course you didn’t.”

“I _didn’t_ ,” she insists.

Bellamy doesn’t slam the door as he leaves -- which is somehow more infuriating -- just offers a mock salute and whirls out of the room.

If he thinks she’s actually going to stay confined to her chambers like a little girl he’s disciplining, well, he has another think coming.

*

The problem with mealtimes since they’ve wed is that Clarke can no longer slip in and out quickly, avoiding interactions with him at all costs and escaping relatively unnoticed. Instead, she has to sit on a gaudy throne at the head of the table right next to him.

An attendant pours some more wine into their goblets, and Bellamy takes another drink. Clarke doesn’t touch hers. She knows that all the food served at the table has been brought into the mortal world, safe for her consumption. But she doesn’t feel like partaking tonight, doesn’t feel like playing nice. Bellamy, true to form, takes no notice, merely continues to offer her plates of food with barely a glance in her direction, shrugging wordlessly when she shakes her head. He seems determined to treat her like a child, an inconvenience. Clarke aches desperately for Asclepius and Nico, for people to help and heal -- for a time when she felt, well, useful. That’s the most infuriating part of this whole mess. It would be one thing if Bellamy seemed to view her as a threat. Instead, all he seems to see is an inconvenience.

It rankles her for days, the feeling of being set aside like a minor irritant in the hope that if he ignores her long enough she might disappear. She doesn’t like this situation any more than her husband does, but she doesn’t have the luxury of pretending none of this exists. It’s all around her, reminding her of it constantly wherever she looks.

Not that she gets to look at much of it, given she’s still _confined to her chambers_.

And it’s not that she just accepts it -- the problem is that no matter how much she yells or how many things she throws at him, he remains unfazed. If anything, he seems to enjoy turning her down more and more with each protest she unleashes on him.  

Clearly, if she wants to get any semblance of freedom around here, she has to do it without permission.

The thing is, after she makes up her mind, the planning is all fairly easy. Forcing the bedroom windows open when she’s sure everyone is out of earshot takes a matter of minutes. Extending her hand she watches as a thick creeper sprouts and winds its way down the side of the palace, twisting and writhing like a great green serpent. There’s something absurd about the sensation of lowering herself steadily down the walls, making like some kind of bandit out of a cell, but it’s exhilarating too, and when at last her feet hit the ground it takes everything in her not to whoop with joy. She has to be careful, of course, slipping away from the palace by sticking to the shadows, constantly avoiding the gaze of guards and passersby. But soon enough, the number of people she passes starts to dwindle until she’s fairly certain she won’t be easily spotted. If she remembers the lay of the land correctly, then she’s not far from where she wants to go. Sure enough, after a little while walking she can make the shape of the Gates out in the distance, and -- there.

She was a little considered the dog might not recognise her, but she needn’t have worried. Cerberus bounds up to her, tail wagging and all three tongues hanging out happily.

“Hi, boy,” she tells him, laughing as all three heads but into each other in his excitement to lick her hello. “Sorry it’s been a while since I’ve seen you -- I missed you!”

Cerberus collapses in a heap at her feet, although it’s hard to think of it as such given he’s still taller than her even flopped on his stomach like this. She runs a hand over the head closest to her to scratch behind one of his huge, flapping ears, and settles herself against his side. She closes her eyes, nestling into the softness of his fur. It strikes her how much she’s missed this, the warmth and closeness of an other living creature. The realisation makes her unbearably lonely all of a sudden, and she feels a pit open in her chest. The dog seems to sense it, as he curves himself around her so that they’re cuddled up more snugly.

“Thanks, boy,” she whispers, burying her face in his fur.

Cerberus lets out three synchronised _woofs_ , which she chooses to understand as “any time.”

She has to reluctantly pry herself away from him a while later, so that she can sneak back into the palace by lunch time. Bellamy doesn’t seem to notice anything’s amiss when she slips into the hall to eat. No one does, and it occurs to her that aside from orders to keep her trapped, there’s probably not one living soul in the whole palace who spares a thought for her the whole day. She swallows down a bite of bread with some effort as her throat feels dry.

She really does miss Nico.

Still, her newfound escape route goes undiscovered. It shouldn’t surprise her; no one cares enough to check. As long as she’s not _disrupting_ anything, she goes uncaught. Clarke spends time with Cerberus, embarrassingly starved for attention of any kind. She wanders around too, less to explore the Underworld than to shake off the cobwebs that feel like they’ve formed in the confines of the palace. She returns to the grove of enchanted fruit, not to eat anything, but to enjoy the simple pleasure of gazing at beautiful plants and wondering idly what’s happening in the world above, if anyone there thinks of her. She wonders what she’d be doing now if she hadn’t jumped after Hades. Treating a patient with Asclepius, perhaps.

Still, idle wondering can only occupy her for so long, and it seems only a matter of time before she returns to the banks of the Cocytus.

It’s a strange sort of comfort, a different kind than Cerberus is. There’s an unbearable sadness about the river, the souls who wail in misery down its current. But it’s a sadness she thinks she can understand, the sadness of lost souls and lonely faces. Sometimes she sits with them, just quietly, and others she’ll talk to them, even sing. Sometimes she cries, letting their moans muffle her out. They grow familiar to her, in a way, even though she’s sure she can’t possibly see the same soul twice -- there are far too many of them for that. Unless she’s imagining things, she thinks that perhaps they grow used to her to.

*

She’s surprised to find Bellamy apparently waiting for her as she returns to their room that night. Normally he’s either already asleep, or else out until after she’s gone to bed, and they cross each other constantly, whether by coincidence or design she’s still not entirely sure. Tonight, however, he’s sat up on the bed, straightening when she enters.

“There’s going to be a banquet tomorrow,” he says without preamble.

“Special occasion?”

He shrugs one shoulder. “I make it a habit to keep the doors of the palace open to my people as often in possible, so that I may be in touch with them and they with me.” Bellamy looks at her. “I’d like you to be there.”

She can’t stifle her scoff. “As if I have a choice.”  
“It’s important to present you after the wedding.”  
“As what, your new toy?”  
“As their _queen_ ,” he says, an edge creeping into his voice.

It rankles her. “I don’t see what they have to gain from ogling me like a bird in a cage. They’re all probably more queen of this place than I am -- or have you forgotten her royal highness has been _confined_?” Never mind that she’s found a way out of it.

“Well perhaps if she would demonstrate even the barest modicum of _courtesy_ and _proper behaviour_ I might be able to reconsider.”

The implication is so insulting she wants to slap him, that her freedom is something he can toss her or sweep away like crumbs as and when it suits him.

“Do you have to keep that up?”

She looks at where Bellamy is glaring. His pillow is bursting apart at the seams where thorns are pricking their way through.

Clarke stare. “That wasn’t me! It’s probably just part of whatever strange magic fuels this hellhole. In case you’ve forgotten, this is a literal hellhole.”

“How could I forget with you to remind me?” He sighs, shoving the ruined pillow -- Clarke didn’t do it, she _knows_ she didn’t -- to the floor. Bellamy returns his withering stare to her. “Be at the banquet tomorrow. Be presentable and generally amenable, and I will consider relaxing your restrictions.”  
She glowers at him.

He remains blank-faced.

“Fine,” she grits out.

Bellamy flashes her a falsely winning smile and makes a point of leaning over to _her_ side of the bed and stealing an intact pillow for himself. “Sweet dreams, Princess.”

He doesn’t know she’s a step ahead. He doesn’t know she’s already stolen back a little, vital piece of her own freedom. He doesn’t know she’s already beaten him. He doesn’t know _her_ , she thinks to herself, and for now, that has to be consolation enough for her to sleep without succumbing to the ever-more-tempting urge to throttle him.

She keeps the knowledge pressed close to her heart the next day, making sure to be extra-meticulous in her escape. She commits to memory each step she takes further from the palace without Bellamy noticing, each one a recollection that she can use like a talisman later in the evening.

“He’s bound to be especially unbearable tonight,” she explains to Cerberus, scratching idly at the juncture between two of his necks while all three tongues loll happily out of their respective mouths. “He already has enough of a superiority complex without having hundreds of subjects fawning over him to make it worse.” She slouches against the dog’s side, humming when she feels his happy rumble of approval.

“My lady?”

She startles when she sees the man gaping at her. Macar, she remembers his name is, one of Bellamy’s personal retinue.

“Yes,” she says, attempting to stand without looking too alarmed at having been caught.

Macar’s eyes dart around. “What are you doing here, Lady Persephone?”

“Just visiting a dear friend,” she answers.

“Careful,” Macar says, “he’s very temperamental! I’ve seen him rip cyclopes limb-from-limb without stopping to breathe.” Cerberus butts Clarke gently with one of his great heads. Macar scowls. “It is my understanding that Lord Hades is out on his rounds. Perhaps you would allow me to escort you safely back to the palace in time to greet him at tonight’s feast?”  
The offer is worded politely, but Clarke is not fool enough to miss the warning lacing them and it rankles her. Macar may bow and simper before her and call her “Lady,” but still she’s treated like a mischievous toddler to be disciplined. She remembers the visceral triumph she’d let herself bask in earlier that day, the feeling of stealing back a modicum of freedom against all orders. For one wild moment, she wonders what would happen if she pushed on, if she climbed astride Cerberus’ back and rode away somewhere. But where would she go? The bounds of Hell seem endless, and all she could ever do is wander.

“Very well,” she says, detached and disinterested as she can make her voice sound, “let us go.” She gives Cerberus a final pat goodbye. “Trust me,” she murmurs when he lets out a pitiful whimper loud enough that she catches Macar flinching, “me too.”

Macar bows and bids her walk a pace ahead of him, and he fills their walk back to the palace with idle chatter, pointing out various shrubs and small structures as matters of great local interest.  
“If you look to your right,” he’s saying, “you’ll see a most pleasing natural rock formation that we call we call the Serpent’s Coil. In honour of the Serpent, of course, one of Lord Hades’ sacred emblems. And on account of its resemblance to a coiled serpent.”

Honestly, Clarke -- who prides herself on a good eye -- can’t tell that it looks like much except a pile of rocks, but she offers Macar a non-committal hum.

By the time they reach the palace, there is the buzz of activity as servants scurry back-and-forth preparing for the feast. Macar sees her all the way to the chamber doors, leaving her with a bow. The rooms are blessedly empty when she enters, but her eye catches on a paper folded on her pillow.

It’s a note, she realises, in what she can only assume is Bellamy’s hand.

_I’ll be escorting you to the feast tonight._

_Maids on the way to help you dress._

_Try to look presentable for your grand entrance._

It's immensely satisfying to be able to rip the the parchment into tiny flakes. If he wants presentable, she’ll give him _presentable_. He may insist on treating her like a prisoner, but tonight -- Clarke squares her shoulders as she approaches the wardrobe -- for tonight, she decides, there will be no treating her as anything less than the Queen.

A volley of maidservants enter the room, and Clarke lets them scrub and scour her without protest. They rub perfumed oil into her skin, stain her lips with ochre and line her eyes with charcoal. They marvel over her golden hair, gathering some of it up into an intricately braided bun, but leaving the less to fall down her back in loose curls. One of the maids moves to fasten in ornamental pins of gold and bronze, but Clarke stops her. Instead, she waves a hand over her haid, and the maids exclaim as tiny white buds of fragrant jasmine dapple themselves through her hair, winking out from the coiffure like stars. She smiles to herself -- it’s an old trick, one she’s been using to dress up ever since she was a little girl.

“Thank you all for your help,” Clarke says, smiling at them. “You may all go know, but Agrippa, would you mind staying to help me dress?” she asks one of the quieter girls.

“Of course not, my lady.”

She shows the girl the tunic laid out on the bed, and Agrippa squeals admiringly. “None of them will be able to stop staring at you!” she giggles, pinning it on where it needs to be.

Clarke smiles faintly. “Everyone here _always_ stares at me.”

“Well yes. But at least now you know you’re worth staring at.”

She can’t help but laugh at that, trying to tamp down an anxious flush. No nerves tonight.

“Which cloak would you like with this, My Lady?”

“You don’t have to call me _my lady_ ,” Clarke says, “Persephone is fine. And as for a cloak…” she glances down at the tunic and at herself in the mirror. “I think tonight, I’ll go without.”

*

“I hope you’re decent,” she hears Bellamy call through the door, “because I’m coming in.”

It’s a good thing she _is_ dressed, because he doesn’t give her much time before striding into the room and stopping short at the sight of her.

“You’re ready,” he says in surprise.

“Yes, Bellamy, I’m ready. I wanted to avoid your nagging me for the fiftieth time today.”

He’s still staring at her. Clarke wants to squirm under his scrutiny, but she refuses to feel self conscious, instead drawing herself to her full height. Her tunic is deep, emerald green, made of a slightly gauzy material that might be translucent in a different light. It doesn’t cover her shoulders -- the cloth is gathered in an artful loop around her neck, fastened with a silvery brooch. The whole thing hugs her figure so closely it looks as though it might have been poured onto her.

Bellamy’s _still_ staring. “Won’t you be cold without a cloak?”

She shrugs, fully aware the movement only accentuates her bare shoulders more.

“I’ll just steal yours,” she snipes.

He huffs, and she takes him in. He’s in black, as usual, his dark tunic offset by a heavy black cloak with a gold brocade border.

“Your hair looks terrible like that,” she tells him. He has it slicked back again.

“Those of us with something _in_ our heads don’t pay much attention to what’s _on_ them,” he grumbles, but she can tell she’s rankled him. Bellamy shakes his head, and hold his arm out to her. “It’s time to go,” he says gruffly. “Try not to make a total mess of this.”

“Bite me.”

He tuts, not looking at her as he guides her down the corridor. When they reach the doors to the great hall, his hand brushes her shoulder just slightly as he guides her in. Clarke shivers -- there must be a draught coming from somewhere.

“Lord Hades and Lady Persephone!” an attendant cries, and there is a cacophanos scraping of chairs as every guest in attendance stands and bows. She takes Bellamy’s lead on this, looking straight ahead and walking slowly to the high table. He only lets go of her hand when she’s stood behind her own chair. Bellamy takes a glass of wine in his hand, and she does the same.

“Honoured guests,” he says, “I welcome you. Tonight my home is your home, my table yours to eat from. It is my honour that you allow us--” with a shock, Clarke realises the _us_ includes her -- “to extend our hospitality.” His words hang in silence for a moment, and then Bellamy’s face breaks into a grin. “Enough from me. Begin!”

There’s a raucous cheer, full of stamping and applause, and the swell of conversation takes over. Clarke pays a little more attention to this feast than she did to the one for her wedding, which passed in a haze of shock and confusion. In some ways, it’s no different than any other feast she’s attended -- people lounge on couches, laughing and yelling and drinking, and the general sense of merriment crackles through the air. On the other, there are constant reminders of where she is, how she couldn’t be further from any home she’s ever known. She still can’t eat most of the food, for one thing -- special platters of food summoned from the world above are brought to her, and although it’s no less sumptuous than anything eaten by the guests, she still prickles under the sense of _alienness_ , the constant remembrance of how little she belongs here. There are less people too, it soon becomes clear, than there would be at another banquet. It still feels full, because the hall is packed, but there are only around two hundred guests, she surmises, where Olympus would see thousands gather. The Underworld may have an infinite number of the dead populating it, but substantially fewer of the living. There is no music either, just the sounds of voices chattering away.

It surprises her, too, how much movement there is. Hardly anyone stays sat in the same spot the whole night. Bellamy doesn’t even wait for the first course before rising and making his way to the backmost tables. To her greater surprise, he lingers by her seat until it’s clear she’s meant to come with him. He guides her through the crowd with a hand on the small of her back -- and truly, her tunic must be obscenely thing because why else would she feel so conscious of the press of his fingers? -- and sits next to her when they reach a table crowded with satyrs and dryads.

As they make their way through the room that night, Clarke is struck by the change that seems to come over Bellamy. The veneer of distance and solemnity she’s become so used to seems to melt away as he mingles with his people, laughing and joking. _They love him_ , she realises, watching as a naiad trips over her words in her excitement at relating some anecdote about her sister’s newborn to Bellamy, and Bellamy listens and nods with genuine interest. The whole thing is confusing. She doesn’t know where this version of Bellamy comes from, why she’s never seen it before.

People take an interest in _her_ as well -- not the gaping and whispering she’d grown accustomed to, but people wanting to ask her a thousand different questions. What is life in the world above like? How does she like it here? When can the people expect news of a royal heir?

That last question makes her choke on her wine, and Bellamy has to clap her on the back, saying “you know the way of it with these things, so unpredictable.”

Bellamy behaves differently to her throughout the night as well. From the way he always keeps and arm on her shoulder, or a hand resting over hers, you could never surmise the animosity between them. The way he laughs at even her most flippant jokes, or makes casual remarks like “yes, our Queen has been adjusting wonderfully” would never betray the fact that they hardly exchange two words with each other on any given day except to yell.

And that, Clarke realises, is the point. All the guests at this banquet will look at the two of them and see a happy pair of newlyweds. A cohesive unit. Slowly, pieces seem to slide into place

So when a drunken dryad nudges her and asks in a whisper loud enough for the whole table to hear, “well my lady? How are you finding marriage to our esteemed Lord?” Clarke smiles, and answers in a clear voice “well, I don’t think I could have asked for a better husband.” And then she beams at him, taking a long drink of wine, enjoying the warmth rush to her head. “Nor he for a better wife, I’m sure.”

The laughter from the guests is uproarious, and they toast to her. She catches Bellamy’s eye. He quirks an eyebrow, raises his glass, and drinks.

It becomes an act that’s increasingly easy to slip into over the course of the night -- she and Bellamy don’t even have to talk to each other really, so long as they hold hands and smile at each other. Once, after the wine has started to truly get to her head, she leans over and presses an impulsive kiss to his cheek, earning sighs and hoots from the nearby guests. Bellamy just squeezes her hand like it’s something they do every day, but she catches him watching her just after, his expression inscrutable.

The wine flows freely all night, and Clarke feels a warm, pleasant buzz overtaking her as she drinks.

“Are you all good?” Bellamy asks her at one point, in a voice so low she almost doesn’t hear him. He’s leaning so close that it looks like he might be whispering sweet nothings into her ear. Everyone else probably thinks that’s exactly what he’s doing, and for some reason, the idea makes her giggle.

“I’m great,” she tells him.

He chuckles and offers her a stuffed date from one of the platters an attendant has brought for her. By the time they’ve made their way back up to the high table from the back of the room, Clarke can’t even fathom how long has passed -- it could have been twenty minutes, or several hours, she doesn’t know. Time seems strange and liquid. Somehow, there is _still_ more food coming, though at this point she’s sure if she eats any more she’ll burst. She reaches for the pitcher of wine, but it’s moved, and she glances round the table to look for it.

“Allow me, my lady,” a voice says from next to her.

“Oh! Thank you--” she glances to the speaker and stops short when she sees Menthe, the pretty dark-haired Naiad. Menthe fills both their glasses, and raises hers for Clarke to clink against.

“I trust you’ve found the evening’s festivities enjoyable?”

Clarke nods, taking a long sip. The naiad really is very pretty -- tall and willowy, with sharp, angled features, piercing green eyes, and onyx-black hair. “It’s been wonderful, thank you.”  
Menthe laughs. “Come now, there’s no need to be so formal, not between us women. I feel as if you and I haven’t yet had a chance to properly get to know each other.”  
“No -- to be honest, it’s all been a bit of a whirlwind since I arrived here.”

“Ah I can only imagine -- it must have been a real shock after the world you’re used to.”  
Clarke shrugs. “Well, you know how it is with big changes. They’re never exactly smooth.” She catches herself before saying too much. “Still, at least I had B-- Lord Hades to ease the way.”

Menthe’s grin turns conspiratorial. “I’m sure.” She leans in close to whisper. “He’s good, isn’t he?”

Clarke had been reaching for her goblet, but her hand stills. “What?”

“Hades. He’s _good_ . You have only to look at those hands to just _know_ don’t you?” Menthe nudges her, like an old friend. “And let’s be honest, if we didn’t already know he was a good, his mouth would be more than convincing. But you hardly need me to tell you this, you’re reaping the benefits for yourself now I’m sure.” She winks at Clarke.

Clarke stares hard into her goblet, determined not to glance over at her husband or show Menthe the flush rising on her cheeks.

“What, you’re not going to share _anything_?” Menthe says, mock-pouting. “Ah well. Every woman must have her secrets I suppose.”

“Yes,” Clarke offers her a tight-lipped smile, “yes I suppose she must.”

Menthe says something else, but then jumps up with an exclamation.

“Are you alright?” Clarke asks.”  
“Oh! Something on my seat pricked me--” Menthe peers closer to the cushion and then retrieves what Clarke recognises as a sprig of prickly cedar. The needles must have stuck Menthe as she sat. “I must not have noticed this before,” the Naiad mutters. “Excuse me.” She slinks off -- to the seat opposite Bellamy, Clarke notices -- and Clarke picks up the barbed little twig. She can’t for the life of her work out how it got there.

*

By the time Bellamy stands to make the night’s closing speech, Clarke is well and truly _drunk_. She only realises when he pulls her to her feet beside him and she almost tips right over, stabilised only by his arm on her back. Still, she manages to maintain her composure as the crowd send the pair of them off with a raucous cheer, and it’s only when Bellamy escorts her into the corridor that she lets herself slide down against a wall to the ground.

“Really?” Bellamy shoots her an unimpressed glare.

“Go if you wanna,” she slurs, “I’m _tired_.”

“I can see that. Do you have some objection to being tired in bed?”  
“You’re so grumpy. I’d be grumpy too if my hair looked like a crow’s wing.”

He makes an exasperated sound, glances both ways down the corridor, and then stoops down and gathers her up in his arms.

“Hey! What are you doing? Put me down you animal!”

“Not while you don’t know how to behave yourself Princess,” he grumbles, setting off towards their bedroom. Clarke wants to try shove him away, but truthfully the rocking motion of him carrying her is making her a little seasick, so she has no choice but to cling to his neck and try stay on.

“I just wanna make it clear I don’t _like_ this.”  
“Oh, and you think I’m having a grand old time I’m sure.” He reaches their bedroom door and shoulders it open, and then more or less throws her on the bed.

“Hey!” she gasps.

He stares at her hard for a moment, then quickly shakes his head and turns away like he’s just remembered something. “Get ready for bed. You’re going to crash any minute now.”

She does feel very sleepy all of a sudden, so doesn’t protest too much as Bellamy disappears behind a screen to change. By the time he’s re-emerged, she’s only managed to get her sandals off and clean her face in the basin. She’s attempting to undo her tunic, but she keeps fumbling with the clasp.

Bellamy sighs. “For goodness’ sake, come here.”

Frustrated, she stomps over to stand in front of him. He reaches down, draws the pin from the brooch out deftly. With his other hand, he holds the tunic in place so it doesn’t slip off. She can feel his fingers, only separated from the skin of her clavicle by the thin layers of fabric. “Thanks,” she rasps, taking over holding the garment together while she takes her turn beside the screen, changing as quickly as she can. Honestly, she plans to just slip into bed as quickly as possible after that, but Bellamy nods towards her stool in front of the dresser.  
“Sit.”  
More because of surprise than anything else, she does. He moves behind her, and she isn’t sure what he’s doing until carefully, he eases out one of the long pins keeping her hair up, setting it down on the tabletop in front of her. He turns his attention to another, and another, and another. Only as the tendrils of hair come loose at last does Clarke begin to realise how heavy it had been having them all piled up, and she can’t help close her eyes at the sweet ache of relief.

“You really don’t have to,” she murmurs half-heartedly.

“Well you can’t sleep with them in, and I can’t put the candles out until you sleep,” Bellamy mutters in return. He’s careful with the sprigs of jasmine in her hair too, she realises, laying them neatly alongside the pins. Her hair is completely lose now. Bellamy starts combing through it methodically with his fingers, untangling knots as she goes. The sensation is soothing, strangely hypnotic.

“Macar tells me he found you with Cerberus. Wandering beyond the bounds of the palace. Where I had explicitly forbidden you from going.”  
Clarke scowls at him in the mirror. “That’s because Macar is a dirty snitch.”

Bellamy turns his attention to her scalp, pressing into it with the tips of his fingers, eliciting an involuntary hiss of pleasure from her as he starts to massage the sorest points firmly. “Macar was simply following my orders. Unlike some people.”  
“Well they were stupid orders. Besides you should be more concerned that your guards were that easy to evade.”

“I have a hard time believing you do anything the easy way Princess,” he snorts, his thumbs moving to work her temples.

“How many times do I have to tell you?” I’m not a princess!”  
He looks thoughtful as he presses into the back of her neck, the tops of her shoulders, before reaching for a hairbrush. “The feast tonight. Did you enjoy it?”

“‘S fun, I suppose.”

“You did well.” He’s started long even brushstrokes through her tresses, careful not to pull too hard. “I was surprised you didn’t sabotage my attempts at civility.”  
“I think we both know the importance of appearing as a unified pair to the people. Making sure everyone believes the Underworld’s leadership is every bit as stable and aligned as a strong kingdom requires. Of course I wasn’t going to sabotage that.”  
This time when she catches his eyes in the mirror, he looks surprised. He sets the hairbrush down to indicate he’s done, but before he can turn away she jumps up and shoves him into the stool instead.

“This has been bothering me all night,” she grumbles, fetching a bowl of water from the basin. “Hold still.” She wets her fingers and starts running them repeatedly through his hair until finally, blessedly, the oil begins to unslick and the curls start re-emerging in their natural place. “Why do you insist on lathering yourself up like a candle?”

“It keeps me neat,” he insists.

“It makes your head look like the hide of a prized horse.”

“It really is anyone’s guess how _you_ managed to remain civil for an entire evening,” he says.

“But I did manage.”

“Somehow.” He wets his lips. “Did you really know that’s what I was doing? Trying to present a united front.”  
She shrugs defensively as she loosens the last of the curl, ruffling the hair thoroughly with her fingers to try to loosen it and give it as much shape back as possible. “I assumed you weren’t being nice for your own amusement.”

“Well. Thank you.”

She stops, grinning at their reflection. “I’m sorry, what did you say?”

“Thanks,” he mumbles, looking as though the word pains him.

“I never thought I’d see the day. Lord Hades showering me with gratitude--”

“That is not what I’m doing.”  
She sticks her tongue out at him, before flouncing to the bed while he gets up, surreptitiously checking his own hair in the looking-glass.

*

The next morning, he wakes her up by chucking his own pillow on her face, which she then promptly hurls across the room at him as he leaves.

She picks it up when Macar comes in some twenty minutes later, informing her in magnanimous tones that Bellamy has relaxed his orders to the guards and that Clarke is to be allowed to roam the lands as freely as she would like.

*

Technically, not much changes about Clarke’s day-to-day schedule. She wanders as aimlessly as ever, though granted she’s now allowed to spend her hours idling away in the palace grounds if she so chooses. But it’s undeniably better, more dignified, to walk freely. Perhaps she’s still here against her will, but she feels less like an outright prisoner. Guards salute her now when she passes them, though they seldom seem to pay her much more attention than that.

Bellamy is still busy most of the time, but she’s no longer actively avoiding him. More nights than not, she’ll be awake when he gets back from his day’s work, and they exchange small talk before settling in to their respective sides of the bed for sleep.

“What is it you do all day?” she asks him one night while he rifles through some scrolls on his desk.

“Hm?” he frowns, looking up like he’s only just realised she’s there.

“Your work -- what do you actually do?”  
He looks perplexed at her asking. “Many things. I always have to make rounds of the realm, check that all the various systems are running smoothly. And of course there are visits to… ” He tails off, but it’s clear he meant to say “visits to the above world.” Where he goes to take people’s lives. Right. All in a day’s work.

Bellamy turns back to his desk, and Clarke rolls over to go to sleep, the still-ragged memory of Nico’s last breaths simmering to the surface of the silence between them until she drifts out of consciousness.

“Can I come with you?” she asks him the next morning, when she sees him strapping his sword belt around his hips as he prepares to head out.

Bellamy doesn’t bother looking over. “No need,” he says, “it’ll bore you. Go back to sleep.”

She swallows down a frustrated huff, because somehow he doesn’t seem to see that therein lies the issue. She _is_ bored. It seems such a trivial concern in the grander scheme of things, in the face of gods and weddings and deaths, but it’s true. It’s small wonder, Clarke thinks, as she wanders listlessly beneath a copse of cypress trees, that so many tales of the Underworld report of ghosts who are driven mad -- she doesn’t feel so far removed from Sisyphus or Tantalus, her constant aimless meandering in search of something to do it’s own impossible form of labour. It isn’t hard to see how the constant repetitiveness, the day-in-day-out cycle of ceaseless drudgery could drive a man -- or a goddess -- mad.

So the next day, she slips after Bellamy into the council chambers. He doesn’t notice her following him, probably has no reason to expect she would, until his councillors start exchanging glances and murmurs when they spot her. He turns around, brow furrowed, and his jaw goes taut when he sees her.  
“Good morning,” Clarke says, smooth and sunny. “Lord Hades has invited me to join him in today’s meeting.” She flashes Bellamy a bright smile. _Go on_ , she tells him in her head, _say something_.

The councillors look to Bellamy. He stares at her. He won’t challenge her, she knows, won’t start an argument where all his closest advisors can see.

“I did,” he says at last, “purely as an observer of course. Cyril,” he calls to the manservant in the corner of the room, “fetch her highness a chair.”

A stool is procured for her and placed by Bellamy. Well, placed _behind_ Bellamy, not actually at the table. Just close enough to “observe,” but she doesn’t say anything. He offers a hand to help her sit, and though she’s sure the quick squeeze he gives her shoulder looks cordial, affectionate even, to everyone else, she can read the warning in his touch.

 _Behave_.

The meeting is a little hard to follow at first -- they speak in a shorthand she doesn’t fully understand, referencing previous meetings, long-standing issues she has no inkling of, people and places she can’t recognise. But she picks up the threads of the conversation soon enough. They seem to be debating the apportioning of souls to each of the different realms of hell.

“It is simple no longer viable,” a severe looking man with salt-and-pepper curls says. “The fields are practically bursting at the seams as it is. Asphodel doesn’t have the capacity for any more souls, so unless mortals cease dying, there will be carnage.”

“That may be so, Rhadamanthus, but what else do you suggest?” A burly blonde-haired man protests. “The laws of the Underworld must be obeyed, much as any edict of the Gods,” he glances at Bellamy, but Bellamy’s expression doesn’t shift. “The Fields of Asphodel are a designated resting place--”

“No one is resting when there is scare room to move for the number of souls packed on each foot of land, Minos!” Rhadamanthus argues back. “I propose the other sectors start increasing their intake--”

“I for one would be happy to,” says another women, “there’s plenty of room in Tartarus and it makes no sense we aren’t using it to its full effect.”

“That’s absurd!” cries a younger man with red curls, “each realm exists as a manifestation of divine justice, not of logistics!”  
“That’s as may be, Aeacus, but has it occurred to you that in order to exert justice as it was intended, logistics must be considered?”  
“Your desire to inflict more torture than you and your little cohort currently do is nothing to do with logistics, Nyx.”

Clarke feels her eyes go wide as she realises that the Night Goddess herself is assembled at the table, along with the three judges of the Underworld. She casts her eyes around the rest of the group, wondering just who else Bellamy might count amidst his confidantes.

“I agree with Aeacus,” Minos says grudgingly, “we can’t dole out our sentences based on simple _convenience._ ”

“Well you don’t seem to have anything--”

“Enough,” Bellamy says. He doesn’t raise his voice, but they all fall silent at once. “Aeacus is right,” he says, looking each councillor in the eye. “Whatever else may be, our duty, first and foremost, is the issuing of justice. To arbitrarily condemning more souls to Tartarus simply for lack of space would be the most profound violation of that duty, and I think we can all agree no one wants that.”

Nothing in his voice is threatening, but Clarke can’t suppress a shiver at the unquestioned authority in it anyway. There’s not one person in this room that would question.

Well, not one _other_ person, she amends in her head.

“But what Rhadamanthus says is true also. The Fields of Asphodel are overcrowded to the point of being unbearable, I have seen it myself. To leave souls to languish for all eternity in such conditions is an injustice of its own sort. So I will ask again -- does anyone have a _solution_?”

For a moment, they are all quiet. Then a tall, slender, sallow-faced man who has up to now sat quietly at the far side of the table speaks up.

“Perhaps it is not within the boundaries of the Underworld that we should seek to make changes.”

Bellamy inclines his head, indicating that the man should go on.

“Once the souls have entered hell they are under our jurisdiction and ours problem to handle. But before they’ve crossed the Acheron…”

Clarke isn’t sure where he’s going with this, but a woman who Clarke hadn’t noticed before, with short hair that’s not so much black as a deep violet, inclines her head. “A useful little loophole indeed.”

Her husband turns to face the woman, and Clarke is surprised by the wariness in his expression, a watchfulness with which he hasn’t regarded any of the other council members.

The woman smiles, the kind of smile that seems to suggest she has a secret. Clarke’s eyes catch on her necklace -- it’s a strange thing, not so much an ornament as several seemingly random, incongruous objects threaded along a thin strip of leather. There’s a few chips of coloured glass, a rusted key, buds of a withered white flower, a small spiked pendant that looks like a wheel, and something that seems suspiciously like an animal paw. The whole thing should look absurd, but against the midnight blue of the woman’s chiton, it just seems…striking.

“If there is an issue with the number of souls _in_ hell,” she muses aloud, “one could, perhaps, make sure that more of them remain _outside_ it.”  
“And how would you propose we do that?” Bellamy asks.

“I do not know,” the woman says airily, though it doesn’t seem like the voice of a woman at all uncertain about anything. “Of course it only matters _how_ if you do choose to do so, my lord.”  
Bellamy eyes her a moment longer, then turns his attention back to the man who had proposed the idea to begin with. “Well, Charon?”  
The ferryman, Clarke realises with a start, who brings most mortals into the Underworld.

“It is true that we _are_ bound by certain mandates. But forgive me for saying that the only authority I am bound to answer to is you, my Lord, not the sacred duties that bind some of my colleagues. It is your responsibility to oversee the souls in hell, but as for my bringing them here… I do so only as that is your behest to me.”

“Surely you’re not suggesting that you simply stop bringing souls over?” Bellamy demands. As much as we are struggling at capacity now, we would be in even greater jeopardy if we were to lose our population entirely.”  
“Of course, my lord, and for that reason I fully intend to adhere to my task as I have always done. I merely propose that we implement… a tax, of sorts.”  
“A tax?”

“A silver obol, say. As payment for my services. Any soul that fails to pay will not enter my ferry, will not cross the Acheron, will not burden the Underworld. And thus for those that do pay their dues, conditions in the afterlife will be fairer.”

Clarke stares. Surely, _surely_ Bellamy won’t agree to this? She tries to catch his eye, to gauge what he’s thinking, but he’s staring hard at the tabletop, brow furrowed in concentration.

“It’s not a bad idea,” someone says, slowly.

“Lost souls aren’t our concern,” someone else says, “not if they’re not in hell.”  
Bellamy doesn’t look up for another long moment. When at last he does, his face is impassive. “All those in favour of the proposition?”

Charon, Minos, Acaeus, and Rhadamanthus all raise their hands. Almost every other person in the room does as well.

“All those against?”

Clarke’s hand flies up before she can think the better of it. Every pair of eyes in the room fixes on her at once, and she resists the urge to shrink back, realising they must have forgotten she was there. Bellamy stiffens when he spots her, jaw clenched, but she holds his gaze. He turns away tersely.

“Any abstentions?” his own hand goes up, as does the hand of the strange woman with the blue chiton.

He looks around the room, nods once. “This meeting of the council is adjourned.”  
They all stand, each one bowing to Bellamy, before filing out the room, talking in hurried whispers. Eventually it is only Clarke and her husband left.

“You can’t be serious!” she splutters rounding on him almost immediately. “ _Charging_ people to take them to the Underworld? You’re just going to end up abandoning people whose families can’t afford to pay!”  
He doesn’t say anything, and that only infuriates her more. “Isn’t enough that you spend your time snuffing lives out, without having to condemn them to an eternity of being _lost_ ? Do you have any heart at all? How can you be such a bas--”  
“That is _enough_ ,” he snaps, rounding on her suddenly, on his feet and striding towards her in moments. “Need I remind you that you barged your way into a council meeting uninvited? I’ve had people condemned to Tartarus for less!”  
“So what?” she sneers at him, “is that what you’re going to do to me? Lock me up so I can’t argue with you?”

“I should lock you up,” he spits, backing her right up until her back hits the wall, “since clearly you don’t know how to keep yourself out of trouble.”  
“I’m sorry I’m such an _inconvenience_ to you and your schemes to disenfranchise the dead just because they can’t afford to rest peacefully!”

“Don’t,” he hisses, “don’t you dare talk to me like you have any idea what you’re saying, like you’re in any position to be dictating what’s right and wrong down here!” He’s so close she can feel his breath warm her face, and staring at the hard glimmer of anger in his eyes it occurs to her that Bellamy has the potential to be very, very dangerous.

She draws herself closer to him. “If you’re doing something wrong,” she says, “I’m going to tell you.”

“Listen to me, Princess,” he says leaning right down so his lips are brushing the shell of her ear and her blood is thundering, “I know you think that because you’ve spent your whole life sitting pretty with the flowers and never having to worry about anything beyond your mother’s little kingdom, you’re somehow so good and pure and noble that you can make everything as nice and easy as you’re used to. But it’s not like that down here. In the Underworld, we have to make hard decisions and ugly choices or everything turns to _chaos_. So don’t think you know what we should and shouldn’t do just because things don’t fit with your rosy little idea of the way the world works.”

She slaps him. She doesn’t think about, doesn’t even realise that she’s doing it really, until she feels the sting of her palm against his flesh, hears it crack. He recoils slightly, more from astonishment than pain she think, but she doesn’t care.

“Fuck you,” she snarls, “you don’t get to tell me if I have and haven’t suffered, what I can and can’t do! Maybe I haven’t being lording my way over an underworld since the dawn of time, but I lost my best friend, because _you took him_! You took him away from me like you take all these people, and now I find you don’t even care what happens to them once they end up here! Do you think it makes you powerful? Huh? Do you? Doing what’s easy because you don’t care enough to ask what’s right?”

“Careful, Princess,” he grits out, his voice as sharp-edged as the blade he carries, “don’t go spouting off about things you don’t understand.”

She tries to shove at him, but he catches her wrists, holds tightly, not enough to hurt, but enough to still any possibility of movement.  
“Stop this,” he says.

“Make me.”

For one long moment, he just stares at her, face hard. For one long moment, Clarke can’t move, can’t speak, can’t breathe, paralysed with rage, with wondering what he’s going to do to her.

Bellamy turns on his heel and storms out of the room, not so much as glancing back over his shoulder at her as he goes.

*

She doesn’t calm down for a long long while, but by the time she does, she’s beginning to feel the worry creeping up on her. However wrong he may be, Bellamy is still the King down here -- there is nothing to stop him from ordering her confined to her chambers again, or sending a contingent of armed guards to swarm her at all times. Clarke paces about the room, mind already abuzz as she tries to predict a hundred different ways the rest of their confrontation might go. There’s a rustling sound, and she glances to her feet. A layer of dead leaves, brown and withered, dusts the floor, crunching whenever she treads on them. Someone must have left the window open -- she turns to close it, but it’s already shut up. Still, she’s practically vibrating with antsy energy, so she opens the window, and slams it shut again, just to be sure. Then she starts stamping harder on the leaves, because the crunching sound distracts from the angry buzz in her ears. Every part of her is simmering with rage, each muscle in her body raring for a fight.

Bellamy doesn’t come, however, even as the hour grows later and later, and finally, worn out by anger and unreleased tension, she resigns herself to a restless night’s sleep. When she wakes up the next morning, it’s clear his side of the bed hasn’t been slept in. She wonders where he went. Even if she wanted to ask him, she couldn’t -- she doesn’t catch even the briefest glimpse of him the whole day.

So he’s avoiding her. Fine.

She can ignore him right back.

Now that she at least has the freedom to roam the Underworld as she chooses, she finds herself taking a lot of long, angry walks. It doesn’t really help. Nothing really seems to take her mind off the acrid taste of anger left behind from the fight; it lingers, curling under her skin like an itch she can’t shake. Even Cerberus seems to pick up on her bad mood, gives up trying to engage her in a game of fetch -- which, granted, hadn’t been particularly successful to begin with, given that what Cerberus wanted to fetch was a snapped branch that was twice Clarke’s size, and much too large for her to throw -- and instead entertains himself by running circles around her chasing his own tail.

One day, she finds herself back on the banks of the Cocytus. The wails of the dead sound less frightening and more plaintive each day. Clarke stretches herself out on her stomach, leaning over the waters. If this were an ordinary river, like one of the ones that would flow through her mother’s lands, the playground of nymphs and satyrs and dryads, she would be able to see her reflection in it now. Instead, it looks only like a shimmering veil of mist. But the longer she looks at it, the clearer the shapes in the mist seem to be, until, at last, she can _see_ them. Faces. Hundreds, no, thousands, _millions_ of them, swirling and rushing through the currents. Each one in front of her for barely a second before spinning away, dissipating forever. It occurs to Clarke that she may well be the last living soul ever to lay eyes on them before they’re consigned to languish in one sector of the Underworld or other for all eternity. It seems unbearably sad to her, all of a sudden, that they’ll last be seen by a stranger. Their moans seem louder, more wretched with each passing second, and so she starts to hum. Just quietly at first, so quietly it’s barely audible over the wails, and then a little louder, and then she starts to sing.

“ _Nani nani to pedhi_

_Oso na ’pokimithi_

_Oso na ’rthi i mana tou_

_Na tou feri louloudha_

_Ore na tou feri louloudha_

_Moskhos ke gharoufala_ ”

The melody is simple, one that’s lingered at the back of her mind ever since she was a small child, when her mother or her nurse would sing it to her. She sings the lullaby again and again, and slowly, incredibly, the wails start to fade until -- it’s not _quiet_ exactly, but the rush of souls is more of a whisper than anything else. They are calmer, she realises, more peaceful.

“For a long time,” she says aloud, wondering how long its been since anyone has thought to speak to the people whose faces rush past in this river, “I didn’t know anyone who’d died.” She smiles a little. “It wasn’t something people really did, where I’m from. But then, I met some… friends. I saw death after that. I saw him often, and I came to hate his face. Which as you can imagine, makes my current situation less than ideal.”  
No one laughs, but the wailing doesn’t start up again. If Clarke had to guess, she might say the souls were listening.

“One of my friends… my best friend, really. He’s gone now. Wherever you’re all going, I imagine that’s where he is. I should have been able to help him, to stop him from--” she cuts herself off before she can choke out a sob. “I thought I could help people, save people, but it didn’t amount to much. But I remember him. I think of him all the time. I remember him always -- that’s what his job was. To help us remember things, because when we remember, we can learn. That much, he taught me.” Slowly, tentatively, she reaches into the river, letting her fingertips drag into the stream. It’s shockingly cold, but light, too, soft almost, like a rush of cool breath. “I don’t know most of you, I know. But from what I’ve seen in the world above -- there are people that love you, that think of you. And I swear I-- I’ll remember you. I will remember you, even if no one else does. That’s a promise.”

They don’t answer her, of course. But as Clarke pulls her hand back from the stream, for the briefest second, the river seems to rise with her, like it’s grasping at her, at her promise. The wails don’t start up again until long after she goes back that evening.

When she returns to the chambers that night, Bellamy is there. He looks up when she comes in.

“Any idea why we have the new carpet, Princess?” he gestures at the floor, which is once again covered in leaves -- an even thicker layer this time, almost shin-deep.

“They must have blown in through the window.”

The _closed_ window, she realises, when Bellamy looks over at it with a pointed glance.

He doesn’t say anything else, so neither does she. He must simply have gotten bored of skulking around wherever he’d been for the past few nights and come back.

They both head for the bed at the same time, and studiously avoid making eye-contact. Millennia old and all-powerful, but the Lord of the Dead’s solution to avoid confrontation is apparently to roll over and screw his eyes shut in the fakest approximation of sleep Clarke has ever seen. She rolls her own eyes in disgust, and settles in to her own side of the bed. She is just succumbing to drowsiness when the blankets are tugged sharply off her, and her eyes fly back open in alarm. Scowling into the darkness, she waits until she hears Bellamy’s breathing even out, and then pulls them back so they’re covering her again. They fly off again a few seconds later.

“Would you _stop_ that?” she hisses.

“I could if you’d stop stealing all the blankets!”  
“Says the man tugging them away like he’s a child!”

“Well I’m not going to freeze just because the princess never learnt how to share.”

“You’re one to talk -- I’m the one who’s been left shivering most of the night and if you think I’m going to -- _hey_!”

He’s reached over and with one strong arm banded around her waist, pulled her into the middle of the bed.

“There,” he grumbles, letting go of her quickly, “now the blanket doesn’t have to stretch over as much space. Just please be quiet so I can get some _sleep_. He rolls over away from her, and Clarke stares at the ceiling, rendered just about speechless with rage.

Who the _fuck_ does he think he is? Her brutish, pig of a husband, confining her to her chambers one minute and throwing tantrums when she points out his _terrible_ ideas the next, sulking for days on end and then reappearing only to complain about leaves and steal her sheets and _mandhandle_ her-- she takes a deep breath because she feels as though she might explode, and contemplates for one long, tempting minute, how feasible it would be to smother him with her pillow while he sleeps. But eventually, her tiredness wins out, and, loathe as she is to admit it, it _is_ warmer and a damned sight more comfortable in the middle of the bed, and soon, the sleep takes over.

*

She doesn’t remember the blankets being this heavy. That’s her first thought as she stirs slowly awake -- their warmth has turned to heat over the night, and they sit on her with unusual, though certainly not unpleasant weight. Clarke sighs, and nestles further into their warmth, almost purring in contentment. The blankets curl around her, and rumble in satisfaction.

Wait, what?  
Her eyes fly open, and she realises that what she had assumed was a pile of blankets is, in fact, a sleeping Bellamy, with whom she has somehow intertwined herself in the night. Her arm is pressed right up against his chest, and his is wrapped around her waist.

Horrified, she scrabbles upright, untangling herself from him as best she can without waking him up. It doesn’t work, and he blinks as he comes to.

“Damn it,” he mumbles, “overslept.”

She flips hastily back to her own side of the bed, hoping he doesn’t notice, and sighs inwardly at how comparatively cold these sheets are.

Bellamy dresses quickly, but he lingers by the doorway, not leaving right away.

“If you see Macar, tell him to send someone to have the floor swept.”  
“Right.”

“And don’t, you know, _leave the window open_ again.”

She glares at his tone, and he sighs. But he still doesn’t leave. In fact, he looks almost… hesitant.

“What, uh. Do you… have any plans for today?”

She stares at him. “What do you want?” She asks him.

Bellamy frowns. “Meaning?”  
“I mean, why are you being so polite to me? Pretending like we aren’t fighting?”

His expression shutters, and instantly, he looks like Hades again, like a King. Like a God. “My mistake, Princess. Goodbye.” He walks away.

Clarke stares after him, then shakes herself.

She finds Macar in the hall when she goes to eat. “Have our bedchambers swept, please,” she tells him, “and get someone to look at the windows if you can. They won’t seem to stay shut.”

“Certainly, my lady.” He turns to go, but she stops him.

“And Macar? Could you please have some food packed for me? I feel like taking a picnic today.”

Clarke clutches the basket of food like a talisman. It’s not really that she was worried about getting hungry, but it seems safer to have normal food with her if she’s here. The orchard is as gorgeous as she remembers, its fruit as jewel-bright and headily-perfumed. Growing up surrounded by Demeter’s lands, Clarke wonders if she ever truly appreciated how beautiful it all was, how peaceful being surrounded by nature could be. It’s hard to describe this orchard as _nature_ exactly, what with its otherworldly quality and the fact that its fruits seem almost to emanate a glow, or even as _peaceful_ when the strange allure of it all underpins any tranquility the little grove has to offer. But it’s beautiful, and it’s certainly a distraction.

“Lady Persephone. I wondered when you might pay me a visit.”

Clarke startles, turning to find the strange lady from the council meeting -- the one with short dark hair and the peculiar necklace -- standing there, watching her.

“I -- I’m… I didn’t realise anyone lived here,” she manages to say, “I apologise. It was not my intention to intrude.”

“You aren’t” the woman assures her. “This grove is not my home. It is merely a place I spend a lot of time. It was a gift from me to your husband, you see, so I like to do my bit to ensure its upkeep.”

Clarke glances around, uncertain. The orchard is as healthy as she’s ever seen anything look, nary a dead twig or fallen leaf or rotted fruit in sight. But it doesn’t look _kept_ in any way -- there’s a wildness to the whole thing that seems uncontrolled, and it’s hard to imagine any individual having a hand in shaping or tidying it at all. “I see. It seems a generous gift indeed.”

She shrugs. “The Underworld is my home too. It’s in my best interests to see the place filled with beautiful, useful things once in a while -- you’ve met Cerberus, I trust?”

“Was he a gift from you as well?”  
“Not quite, but I did secure him at Lord Hades’ request. I’ve always had a fondness for dogs, black ones in particular.”

“Well, I should thank you. Cerberus has been a dear companion to me.”

“And a useful addition to this realm, as my acquisitions tend to be.”

“And this place?” Clarke has to ask, “is cursed fruit _useful_ ?”  
The woman smiles. “At the right time, in the right hands, anything is useful.”

Clarke swallows. “I was sorry not to have been acquainted you before the meeting,” she says, hoping to change the subject. “I feel as though I’m always one step behind when it comes to meeting everyone here.”

“Oh don’t be sorry. I’m usually tricky to track down. I did however, wish to give you a wedding gift.”

“That’s very kind, but really not necessary--”

“I insist,” the woman smiles, though something about her voice makes it sound less like an offer and more like a threat. “But before I give it to you, I wonder if you might like a tour?”

“What?”

“This realm is expansive, and I’m sure there are plenty of parts of it you haven’t seen, my lady. If you would be amenable, it would be my honour to show you some more of it.”

Her words are as flattering or obsequious as any spoken by Macar or one of the palace attendants, but nothing in her tone seems remotely subservient. There’s a joking, almost mocking edge to her words in fact, one that leaves Clarke a little uneasy.

“Well if it’s really no trouble for you--”

“None at all, my lady. This way, if you will.”

She holds her arm out, and Clarke thinks she’s simply beckoning her forward, but she grabs Clarke’s wrist, and suddenly, they’re being wrenched through space and flung through darkness. The whole thing only seems to last a second, but when Clarke steadies herself again, they’re somewhere she’s never seen before. It’s a vast plain of some sort, desolate and empty except for small copses of white flowers scattered across the ground what feels like every few feet, growing from matted green-brown grass. And then she realises it’s not empty, and what she’d taken for a cold breeze is in fact souls, hundreds of them, drifting around the fields.

 _Drifting_ is really the only word for it -- they move in something between a walk and a float, and if they were living flesh-and-blood people, it would be so crowded there would be no space to breathe. Instead, they all float through each other, unblinking, no sound expect for faint whispers and rustles. It looks how Clarke imagines the inside of one of Zeus’ great storm clouds might, roiling and silvery-grey and practically bursting at the seams. She knows, without having to ask, where they are.

“The Fields of Asphodel,” her companion announces as if she’s commenting on the weather, “I’m sure you heard it mentioned by the council.”

“Everyone knows about the Fields of Asphodel,” Clarke says.

“Fitting, since almost everyone finds themselves here eventually.”

Looking round, it’s not hard to believe that. There doesn’t seem to be an inch of space that doesn’t have a soul wandering through it. There’s a charged restlessness to the whole place -- even though none of the dead down here have their bodies, it feels like too much, too overcrowded. Clarke remembers the look that would come over people’s faces if she couldn’t save them, if they died -- their features would slacken and their eyes would mist over before she closed them. They’d look peaceful, as if they were dreaming. Nothing about this place is peaceful, nothing here suggests that the dead will have any kind of rest for all eternity. It’s more than that too -- however many souls there may be, they all seem utterly alone. None of them look at each other, reach for each other.

“This place isn’t exactly the most glittering jewel in the Underworld’s crown,” the woman says airily, “next I shall take you to Elysium -- I think you’ll find it much more to your liking.”

The idea of it makes Clarke feel ill, visiting the resting place of the great heroes and watching them bask in luxury and comfort knowing the despondence of Asphodel.

“Perhaps another time,” she says, managing a wan smile. “I think I’d like to… to go back now, if you would take me.”

“As my lady wishes.”

Clarke is prepared for the journey this time around, though it isn’t any more pleasant. They end up back in the orchard, and her companion settles herself comfortably under the shade of a tree, beckoning for Clarke to join her. She sits down, tentative. Clarke’s eyes keep darting to the spaces around her, in front of her. It seems like so _much_ all of a sudden, too much room, absurd amounts of it really, when most of the time it’s easy for Clarke to imagine she’s the only person out here. She shakes her head, clearing her thoughts, and turns back to the woman beside her.

“If you recall,” the woman says, smiling beatifically, “I meant to give you your wedding gift.”

“This is much too generous…”

The woman waves her off, and produces a small pouch. It seems to have materialised from nowhere, and Clarke suspects that may well have been the case.

“For you.”

“Thank you,” Clarke says, taking it and pulling on the threads binding it so its contents spill into her palm. “This… this is beautiful,” she says, drawing a sharp breath through her teeth. And it is -- it’s a brooch in a kind of workmanship that she’s never seen before. It’s made of seven bronze, thinly hammered strips, shaped like an asterisk enclosed in a round band, so that the whole thing looks like a spoked wheel. Each bronze strip has a single uncut ruby set in the middle of it.

“Allow me,” says the lady, reaching forward to pin it to the shoulder of Clarke’s chiton. “There. Fit for a queen.”

Clarke stares at it. The red stones seem to twinkle back at her.

Her companion stands abruptly. “I’ve very much enjoyed becoming better acquainted with you, Lady Persephone. I trust we shall meet again soon.”

“Wait,” Clarke says “what’s your name?”

But the woman has already vanished, apparently disappeared into nothingness. Clarke can’t bear it, all of a sudden, being here by herself in all the vast openness of the Underworld. She practically sprints back to the Cocytus, dropping to her knees by the banks. The souls are wailing, again, pitiful and plaintive.

“I’m sorry,” she murmurs, reaching into the water with both hands, letting daisies and carnations drop into the water, as if the pretty flowers will allay the eternal desolation that the souls are bound for. Thick ropes of brambles and nettles seem to be spilling forth from somewhere, and Clarke _knows_ she didn’t create those. She pulls her hands back, stopping the flow of flowers, and lets the souls just swirl around her fingers, trying to offer them a final brush of comfort.

She starts humming the same lullaby from earlier softly, letting the gentle cadence of it wash over the river as slowly, gradually, the moans begin to quieten.

It’s hard to say how long she stays there, given there’s no sun or shadows to track in the Underworld, but it must be a long time, because she doesn’t even think of moving until she becomes aware of something moving to crouch beside her.

“ _Nani nani to pedhi_

_Oso na ’pokimithi_

_Oso na ’rthi i mana tou_

_Na tou feri louloudha_

_Ore na tou feri louloudha_

_Moskhos ke gharoufala”_

She sings the verse a final time, before turning to look. It’s Bellamy, she realises with a start, staring at her with an unfathomable expression on his face. You could get lost in those brown eyes of his and never find your way back out, she thinks.

“What are you doing here?” she asks quietly.

“I come here every night,” he says.

“Oh.”

Bellamy turns to look at the waters. He has his hand in the current too, she notices, and the souls are swirling around his as comfortably as they do around hers. “That song you were singing,” he says in a low voice, “it’s a pretty tune. What is it?”  
She shrugs. “Just a lullaby. It was sung to me when I was younger. I think it brings them some comfort.”

He looks at her again, and then back at the souls. They are quiet for a long while, just letting the souls drift through their fingers.

“I-- I saw Asphodel today. The Fields,” she says at last, breaking the silence.

Bellamy doesn’t reply right away, but she senses his shoulders go tense next to her.

“I didn’t know,” she worries her lip. “I didn’t know… I didn’t realise how bad it was. It felt so troubled.”

When he speaks, his voice is low, rough. “I don’t want to turn anyone away. The dead… this is supposed to be their _home_. So what do I do? Leave them to wander aimlessly, lost for all eternity because they have no money to cough up, or do I welcome them here and then store them like cattle and tell them it’s rest?” He laughs hollowly, scrubbing a hand over his face. “What does it matter anyway? This place could never be a home, there’s no one who would choose to spend the rest of their existence here.”

“Bellamy…”

“What? Are you going to tell me you love it here all of a sudden?” He doesn’t sound annoyed, though, just weary, and a note of something else she can’t quite place.

“I was going to say I’m sorry. Don’t mistake me, I still don’t like it, the idea of taxing the dead. But I shouldn’t have blamed you the way I did.”

His throat bobs. “Why not? You’re right. It’s a cruel decision. It punishes people for being _poor_.”

“I know. And it’s something that has to be fixed. But you know that. And you’re right -- I _don’t_ know the Underworld, I had no idea how bad it was in Asphodel. So I’m sorry.”

Bellamy looks down. “I’m sorry too, Princess. You’re not a child, and you’re certainly not stupid. I shouldn’t have treated you like you were.”

“Just… don’t do it again.”

“I’ll do my best.” He offers her a small smile, one that makes his whole face seem softer and younger. “How often do you visit them,” he asks, turning back to the river, “the souls?”  
“I try to come most days.”

“You bring them peace,” he says, “they seem calmer around you.”

It’s her turn to look down. “I just want to help.”

“Yes,” he says, slow. “I’m beginning to see that.” He stands, offering his hand to her. She takes it, and he pulls her to her feet. “It’s beginning to get late. We should go back.” He lets go of her hand, but doesn’t move very far, and they start the walk back to the palace with their shoulders brushing.

They don’t talk much at dinner, but the silence is a comfortable one, and it feels lighter than it has in weeks. When Bellamy finishes his meal, he waits for her, and walks back to their room with her.

“I forgot to ask,” he says, his back to her as they change for bed. “How did you manage to get to Asphodel?”

“Oh. The woman from the council meeting -- the one with the short hair and that necklace -- found me, said she’d been hoping to see me. She offered to give me a tour.”

“Of course she did,” he mutters, “I might have known. Did she say why she was looking for you?”  
“Yes, she wanted to give me this.”

He turns to look, and she leans forward to show him where the brooch is pinned on.

“That’s, uh. That’s -- that’s nice.” He turns away quickly.

Clarke unpins the brooch. It takes a few tries, because her fingers keep fumbling for some reason. “Who is she? That woman?”

“That,” Bellamy says grimly, “is Lady Hecate.”

“ _What_ ?” She pulls her nightgown over her head and whirls around to gape at him. “The Witch Queen lives here?”  
“She doesn’t really live anywhere,” Bellamy says, pulling the blanket back and climbing into bed, “but the Underworld is one of her more regular haunts.”

Logically, perhaps it isn’t that strange that the Goddess of Magic favours the Underworld, but it still makes Clarke shiver to think of.

“Why do you think she was so interested in me?” she asks into the darkness as she climbs into bed.

“Strange as it may seem, there isn’t actually a lot of excitement in the Underworld outside of the dead. You’re the biggest news people have had down here for a while -- maybe she’s simply curious.” He doesn’t sound completely convinced, but Clarke doesn’t know what else could be going on.

When she settles against the pillows, sleepiness overtakes her in waves. “‘Night” she mumbles as she slips out of consciousness.

She thinks she hears Bellamy murmur “goodnight Princess,” but then again, she could have been dreaming.

*

_“Oh god,” she gasps, trying desperately to buck her hips closer to his mouth, “please!”_

_“Easy, Princess.” Bellamy pins her hands to the bed by the wrist, moving his mouth down her neck before hovering above her mound. “God I fucking love the taste of you. Can’t get enough of it, sweetheart.”_

_“It’s for you Bellamy,” she whines, “it’s all for you!” Her moans become wrecked as he starts to lick into her, deep and relentless, and she feels herself approaching a crest, closer, closer—_

Clarke wakes with a gasp because someone is insistently shaking her shoulder.

“What are you doing?” she grumbles, swatting at Bellamy, who remains unphased. _Bellamy!_ She goes rigid. It’s fine. _He doesn’t know you were having a dream. A very stupid dream. It’s not like you enjoyed the dream._

_Much._

“Don’t go all grumpy on me,” he says, firmly, “rise and shine. We have things to do.”

 _We?_ She sits up, rubbing at her eyes. “What things?”

Bellamy is already dressed, and unceremoniously thrusts an outfit at Clarke before she’s even fully out of bed. She still can’t bring herself to look at him, the false memories of her dream lingering at the edges of her consciousness.

“I’m holding open court today,” he says, not turning away until she hoists herself out of bed, “and you’re going to come with me.”

She knows vaguely that open court is when Bellamy opens his doors to the residents of the Underworld to hear out their problems and complaints. He’s never asked her to accompany him before.

“You want me to watch?”

“I want you to hold court with me.”  
She stares at him, sure she must have misheard.

Bellamy sighs impatiently. “Hurry up and change, we can’t be late.”

Clarke rushes behind a screen to change as quickly as she can, willing the blush that has risen in her cheeks to subside. Her mind whirls with questions. “I don’t understand,” she says, almost having to jog to keep pace with Bellamy, “why do you want me with you?” Her voice sounds almost embarrassingly eager, but she can’t bring herself to care just now.

Bellamy shrugs, apparently nonchalant, although he doesn’t turn to face her so she couldn’t say for sure. “If we’re going to present a united front, this is an obvious place to start.”

Clarke nods, picking up her pace so she’s walking properly beside him. “That… that makes sense.”  
“Don’t sound so surprised, Princess.”

She can’t help it; she _is_ surprised. This time yesterday, she’d likely have been wandering aimlessly round some listless part of the Underworld, whiling time away until bed.

“I need to familiarise myself with your laws,” she says half to herself, “and if you have any records of previous open courts I ought to consult them, understand what precedents have been set up. And what if there are ongoing disputes brought before us to settle? I’ll need to be briefed on their histories so that I’m making informed decisions, taking full account of context and--”  
“Hey,” Bellamy turns around abruptly and clasps her shoulders in his hands, and the rest of her words halt in her throat. “I get the sense you’re panicking.”  
“Not _panicking_ ,” she protests, “just…” she looks at the floor, the spot beside his ear, anywhere but directly at him. When she speaks again, her voice has gone small. “I want to do a good job. I want to do things right.”

He smiles a little at that, and beneath the layers of buzzing anxiety and anticipation, Clarke has room to marvel once more at how young it makes him look, almost boyish. “I know you do.”  
“How am I supposed to do a good job if I have no idea what I’m doing?”  
“Hey, I’m not just going to throw you to the dogs and leave you to flounder. If you want to take this session to just observe, you can. You’ll pick it up quickly enough.”

She blinks. “Who are you and what have you done with my husband?”  
Bellamy huffs a laugh and offers her his arm. “Shut up. It’s time to make our entrance.”

Somehow, despite the hum of nerves and the strangeness of Bellamy’s suddenly generously good mood, Clarke thinks she manages to enter the throne room with an appropriate semblance of dignity. There is a relatively small crowd gathered, and although they all bow respectfully as she and Bellamy enter, something about the atmosphere feels relatively less formal than the one in the council meeting. For one thing, the people gathered are clearly not all lords and ladies of the court. There are all sorts here: satyrs, dryads, nymphs, some leaning against the walls and others settled on the floor. Bellamy’s living subjects. He takes her hand to lead her up the stairs of the dais where his throne sits -- and next to it, a chair that she’s sure wasn’t there before. It’s obviously a temporary fixture, possibly just carried up there this morning, but it makes her start nonetheless. Bellamy doesn’t look at all surprised however, simply waits until she stands in front of her seat to step towards his own throne. He turns to face the crowd. “We welcome you all this morning. This open court is now in session.”

They sit at the same time, and then it begins.

*

For someone else, the whole day might be… well, _boring_. There were various problems Clarke imagined the residents of the Underworld might have had, but none so mundane as the ones being presented before them -- petty disputes over land, wondering why this-or-that menial task hasn’t been carried out by the person who promised to do it, occasional requests for supplies from the above world. She can’t help but pay attention though, the whole event playing out like some great puzzle she must solve.

True to his word, Bellamy takes point on most things -- he knows his kingdom inside-out, Clarke realises, every part of its function from the lowliest peasant cottages to the gates of Tartarus. He listens to each appeal carefully, considers his answers, is thoughtful of each of his subjects. Every so often, he’ll turn to check in with her -- not always much, usually just a “do you agree?” or “what do you think, my Lady?” He’s establishing her authority, she realises, making a show of the fact that she is presiding over things along with him. It makes her feel something she cannot quite name.

They’re down to the last few subjects, and an old satyr steps up.

“My lord, my lady,” he says, bowing his head.  
“Grumius,” Bellamy waves him forward, “the floor is yours.”

“I am worried about my labour, my lord. I tend a small copse of willows in the eastern meadows. But of late, I have found that my hands grow tired, and I am not able to work as I once was.”

Bellamy frowns. “You are entitled to a pension, Grumio, once you have served your duty long enough. I thought you had a son to take over after you?”

“I do, my lord, two sons in fact. But more than my labour, I find I am in pain. My hands ail me greatly, and I struggle even to lift my pipe to play it these days.”

There is a sympathetic murmur in the court -- satyrs are practically slaves to their music, and not much can come between them and their instruments.

“May I see them?” Clarke asks.

“M-my lady?” Grumius’ eyes flick between her and Bellamy, but Bellamy just nods. “Come forward, let the Lady Persephone inspect them.

She doesn’t dare look at Bellamy any longer, but she can feel his eyes on her. Watching. The satyr approaches the dais hesitantly, and Clarke stands, crossing over to him. “May I?” she asks again.

He nods, and she takes his hands in hers. It is as she suspected -- they are gnarled and bent with age, and they look painfully swollen in places. She has seen hands like these before, especially in the elderly patients she would visit with Aesclypius and Nicomachus.

“This isn’t uncommon with old age,” she tells him gently, “and there is little that can be done to reverse the physical effects. But I am able to prepare a remedy that may help ease the pain, at least enough so that it proves less of a hindrance to your everyday affairs.”

“I would be ever grateful, my lady! You have no idea how excruciating it is.”

“It won’t take me long to prepare,” she says, “give me a day, and then-” she had been about to offer to bring it to him, but she hears Bellamy cough behind her and she pauses, thinking.  
“You said you live near the eastern meadows?”

“Yes, my lady.”

She glances at Bellamy, who gives her a single barely perceptible nod, before turning back to Grumius. “Leave directions to your home with Macar over there by the door. One of the guards will bring you the remedy on their rounds tomorrow.”

“Thank you, my lady, thank you!”

She sits back down, an Grumius bows, retreating back. A few more come and present their complaints, but soon enough, Bellamy is calling the meeting closed. He gives her his arm and they return to their chambers.

“So,” Bellamy says as she closes the door behind them.

“So.”  
“How did you find it?”

She wets her lips, staring at him. “I -- I think it went well.”  
He nods, beckoning for her to continue. “I obviously need to learn more about the practicalities of the people’s day-to-day lives before I can be of much help but I think I did what I could.” She glances back at him.

He watches her for another long moment, and then the corner of his mouth tugs into a grin. “Nervous much?”

She huffs. “Shut up.”  
“Clarke?”  
“ _What_?”

“You did good.”

“Oh,” she blinks. “Um. Thank you.”  
He smiles at her then, a real smile, shaking his head a little. “You told Grumius you would have his medicine sent to him, rather than delivering it yourself. Why?”

It’s a bit of a trick question -- Bellamy knows as well as she does that she wouldn’t have reconsidered without his interjection -- so she spends a minute shaping her answer. “How we respond in front of them sets precedent. My visiting Grumio once would mean that any future such requests would likely demand I also did the deliveries in person. And if more and more people needed medical help, that would no longer be feasible.”

Bellamy nods. “Remember everything you do here is as a leader, a political figure. People will read into your actions whether or not you mean them to.”

It makes sense. “You know for some things, I’ll have to help treat people in person,” she says, “I can’t just give them a potion and call it a day.”

“And for those people, you can visit without creating rumours about why you favour certain residents over others.”

Clarke sighs. “I guess you’re right.”  
“I get it, you know.”  
“Hmm?”  
“It’s not easy, doing the right thing when it feels like the wrong one.” There’s a faraway look in his eyes, one that makes her lean forward and ask what he means. Bellamy shrugs, but he doesn’t really seem casual. “Being down here, a place like this…it’s never easy to work out what the best way to save everyone is.”

“I… I don’t think I understand.”  
He shakes himself. “It doesn’t matter. Are you tired?”

She isn’t, really, but sensing his desire for the conversation to end, she nods. As they climb into bed, she says, “hey, Bellamy? Tomorrow, could someone… show me around, I guess? Like -- introduce me to people. Help me understand how things really work?”  
He doesn’t answer straight away, and when she rolls over to look at him, his expression is… well, it’s not what she expected.

“Yeah,” he says, quietly. “Yeah, I’ll, uh, arrange that.”  
It’s hard to say, what with the darkness and her eyes drooping, but she’s pretty sure he’s still looking at her when she falls asleep.

*

She has another dream _._ It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just _inconvenient_.

*

The subsequent days seem to move infinitely more quickly. She’s busy in a way she hasn’t been for a long time, every hour of her time devoted to _something_ — visiting residents, inspecting the small Underworld answer to farms, mediating petty disputes. She keeps visiting the Cocytus too, the rush of souls providing an odd sort of relief from the bustle of the day. Whenever Bellamy is free, he’ll take her round parts of the Underworld himself, and increasingly lets her lead conversations with their subjects or even some of the councillors. Most days he sits by the Cocytus with her. Sometimes they talk — she asks him about things in the Underworld she still doesn’t understand, or that she wants to know more about. He asks her questions too, about her life in the world above. At first, she thinks he’s just being polite — there can’t be much about the world that she could say that he wouldn’t already know, surely? — but he does seem to be sincerely interested, always listening intently, asking for more details when she glosses over something. She can’t talk much about her life with coming back to Nico again and again. It hurts, still, to talk about him. But it helps too, keeping his name alive. _So we won’t forget_.

“I am sorry,” Bellamy says one day. “I know you cared for him.”

She picks at her nail.

“I don’t choose,” he says, and his voice sounds tight, thick. “Who I take and when. It’s not my choice. It’s my duty. When the Fates cut a thread a life ends. It’s all I can do to make sure a soul finds its rest.”

Clarke doesn’t say anything to that, but then again some days neither of them do. There are days when they simply sit quietly, letting the murmur of the souls fill the silence. When the souls are restless or agitated, Bellamy and Clarke will let their hands trail in the water, and she will sing softly until they calm again.

There are still blanks in her knowledge. Her understanding of what _exactly_ Bellamy does all day, whilst definitely more fleshed out than it was at the start of her time in the Underworld, is still often vague. And it’s the Underworld -- there are several millennia of history for her to catch up on. Still, whilst the questions are ever-present at the back of her mind, it’s easier not to dwell on them when she has things to occupy her time.

One day, a guard knocks tentatively on her door and explains that one of the trainees has injured his leg and can’t walk right on it, and is there anything she could do to help? Clarke tells him she’d have to examine it to know for sure, and that’s how her “house calls” start. They don’t happen every day -- busy as it keeps her, the Underworld isn’t actually that populous (not in terms of living residents, anyway), and a fair number of those residents that there are, are immortal or otherwise rapidly healing. But she enjoys it, being able to help people where she can. Clarke hadn’t realised how starved she was for company until she gets to start visiting people, speaking with them while she works. The ache of loneliness still shadows her, the phantom of Nico not far as she adjusts to working on healing without him and Aesclypius at her side, but she doesn’t have to hide from her patients this time.

“This is very good of you, my lady,” a middle-aged dryad tells her as Clarke applies a salve to a nasty burn on the tree-nymph’s arm, “you’re a very clever thing to know how to do it.”

She ducks her head to hide her smile at that. “It’s just something I picked up along the way.”  
“Even so. You’re kind to share your gifts with us.”  
“It wouldn’t be much of a gift if I kept it to myself,” she jokes, “immortals don’t often have use for healing ourselves.”

Once she finishes dressing the wound, Clarke is about to leave, but the dryad offers her some willow bark tea, and after a moment’s hesitation, she accepts. Clarke can’t stay and talk for very long -- not when she’s supposed to meet Macar who will be running over some maps of the Underworld with her and explaining its boundaries more clearly -- but she does stay, for a little. It’s only tea and a bit of a chat, but when Bellamy finds her on the riverbank that evening, he finds her humming softly. And this time, it doesn’t even seem like the souls are particularly troubled.

*

One night, Bellamy doesn’t come home. It’s not something that seems unusual at first, not something she even notices. True, this is the first time in a long while he hasn’t come down to the Cocytus in the evening, but it happens sometimes -- he’s caught in some meeting or some errand in the Aboveworld or something else. Clarke shrugs it off. She doesn’t even think about it when she settles in for bed that night, idly scribbling up a list of potions and tinctures she needs to make for the guards to deliver round tomorrow afternoon. Bellamy often goes to bed later than she does.

It’s only when the flame of the lamp at her bedside starts to flicker as the wick’s been burnt through that she starts to wonder. It’s late, very late, much later than she remembers Bellamy being out before. As many duties as he has, most of them keep him in the Underworld. She’d normally at least have seen him by this point, at dinner if not by the river. But there’s no sign of him, not even a guard knocking to inform her that her husband has business that is keeping him away, as has happened once or twice before.

She starts to get restless -- it’s annoying really. How is she supposed to settle into sleep knowing he might come stomping in here in the middle of the night, clattering about and waking her up again? Inconsiderate oaf. Clarke sits up in bed with a huff, pulling the blanket around her a little more tightly. The bed feels colder than it normally does.

“Hurry up,” she grumbles into the darkness.

There is no response in the silence.

Blanket still wrapped around her like a cloak, she pads down from the bed and settles in one of the chairs. Her eye drifts to the little bell in the corner of the room. It’s there to summon servants, but she hardly ever uses it. Besides it’s late -- just because she’s not getting much sleep doesn’t mean no one else should. She relights the oil lamps around the room, and decides to burn a little incense as well. Perhaps the softly pulsing lights and wafts of sandalwood will lull her to sleep.

When half-an-hour passes and there’s still no sign of him Clarke gets up and sticks her head out the door. The two guards, who had been slouching against the wall, shoot upright.

“My lady,” one of them says hurriedly, bowing, “is everything alright?”

“Quite alright, thank you,” she smiles, resisting the urge to burst out with something like _where the fuck is my husband_ ? “I’m just going to go to the kitchens for some tea -- I think it will ease the chill I’m feeling tonight.”  
The other guard frowns. “We can easily call for a servant--”

“It’s no bother,” she waves him off, “I think the walk might help me sleep.”

They bow again, and she heads on her way. Only when she’s sure they’re distracted does she duck through another passage to where she knows Macar’s chambers are. The likelihood is there’s some perfectly rational explanation for Bellamy’s absence. There’s no use in causing a stir and worrying the guards with random questions about Lord Hades being missing.

She knocks softly when she reaches the door, and thankfully, Macar is a light sleeper, because he appears moments later.

“My lady,” he says, looking puzzled, “is something the matter?”  
“I hope not,” she says. Clarke pauses, worrying her lip. “It’s my husband. He’s not… he hasn’t returned from wherever he was today.”

Macar frowns. “Oh? I’m sure he was simply held up on business, my lady. I can assure the palace is quite safe nonetheless.”

She sighs. “I wondered if you knew where he was?”

“Ah,” Macar looks at her almost pityingly. “Well I couldn’t say for sure, but I am certain it is nothing to worry about.”  
She looks at him expectantly.

“Sometimes,” he says, placatingly, “it is not uncommon for Lords to, ah, vary _where_ they sleep. It is only natural, you know, nothing you ought to take personally. Worry not, my lady, I am sure your husband will be back with you in the morning, and all will be--”

Clarke feels her cheeks flame as she realises what Macar is implying. “I’m not -- Lord Macar! If I thought Lord Hades had simply been caught up in the matter of a new bedfellow I can assure you I would be sleeping unconcerned! I’m asking where he is because I haven’t seen him all day and unless you’re implying that your diligent monarch has been waylaid for an entire _day_ I suggest we end this conversation here!”  
Macar has the grace to look abashed. “I… I meant no offence to you or your husband, Lady Persephone.

She’s still fuming, though. Everything about his implication makes her want to smack him -- as if he thinks her question is the result of some misplaced naïvité. She’s just _concerned_ , and rightly so! If Bellamy was simply traipsing off to bed some girl then that wouldn’t be anything to lose sleep over.

She storms back to her chambers, ignoring the guards when they scramble to bow to her. Bellamy _still_ isn’t back, and to make matters worse, when she catches sight of her nightgown, the bottom of it is completely scratched up and riddled with tiny holes. She grabs the hem of it for closer inspection, and drops it with a hiss. Somehow, the whole thing is banded with a thin, thorny vine that definitely had not been there before. Clarke stares at it, and the curls of anxiety that had already taken root in the pit of her stomach unfurl into pure fear. She changes quickly into a clean nightgown, shoving the other one under the bed. When she settles back into her chair, running her fingers over the rubies in Hecate’s brooch more to keep her hands occupied than for anything else, she could swear the whole room seems even colder than before.

*

The only reason Clarke realises she must, eventually, have gotten some sleep is because she wakes up. It’s bleary and confusing at first, and the crick in her neck and stiffness in her back tell her she must have fallen asleep in the chair. Dimly, she grows aware of someone shuffling around the room, and she blinks fully awake with a start.

“ _Bellamy_ ?”  
He freezes with his back to her. “Sorry to wake you, Princess. Go back to bed. Or back to… chair. Or come to bed.” He sighs. “Just go to sleep.”  
That makes her scowl and she stands up. “That’s rich coming from you! Who’s the reason I barely got any sleep last night?”  
He snorts softly. “I wasn’t even here.”

“Exactly! I was so _worried_ \--” Bellamy glances over his shoulder at that, and she practically trips over her words in her hurry to clarify -- “that the second my eyes closed you’d come barging in at some outlandish time and wake me up again.”

He rolls his eyes and turns away again.

“ _Well_?” she demands. “What were you doing? What kept you so long?”

“Just work.” He waves a hand at her dismissively. “I was Above. Guiding souls, I was just slightly delayed.”  
She marches right up to him. “Are you seriously expecting me to--” Clarke stares. She had reached forward, forcibly tugging him to face her, but she hadn’t been prepared for the sight that now faces her. A purplish bruise blooms in a half-moon across the curve of Bellamy’s jaw, and another smaller one over his eyebrow. A gash runs all the way across his chest, right across his tunic leaving a long rip that is wet with blood. “Bellamy,” she whispers.

“It’s nothing,” he says.

“Do you think I’m blind or an idiot?”  
“I’m serious,” he tells her, “I’ve sustained worse. It always heals within a few days -- perks of immortality, remember?”  
“Sit.”

“What?”

“ _Sit_.”

Bellamy looks slightly bewildered, but does as she asks, perching on the edge of the bed. From the dressing counter, she retrieves the small box of tools she uses for house calls and crosses over to him. He doesn’t say anything as she kneels in front of him, running a hand along the length of his chest as he examines his wound. Reaching for a small blade from her box, she slices deftly through the shoulders of his tunic so it falls away.

He raises his uninjured brow. “This seems uncharacteristically foreword of you.”

She gives him a look, before returning her attention to his wound. It’s not as deep she had originally thought, but still looks painful. Tearing off a clean strip of gauze, she starts dabbing at it gently, cleaning off the blood. Bellamy gives no indication of discomfort beyond tensing slightly, so slightly that she doubts she’d have noticed had her hand not been brushing over his abdomen.

“This is a sword wound,” she says, conjuring up a handful of witch hazel and placing it into a pestle and mortar. “Looks like someone tried to slash you.” Her eyes flick back up to the bruises painted across his face. “Tried giving you a pommel to the eye as well by the looks of it.” She starts grinding the witch hazel, crushing the yellow buds firmly, methodically between the stone implements. “Now if you don’t want to tell me what happened,” she says, pitching her voice just so its clear over the scraping of pestle against mortar, “that’s fine. But try telling me it was _nothing_ again,” she dips a clean square of gauze into the clear liquid that she’s ground out of the witch hazel, then presses it to Bellamy’s wound without warning, making him hiss, “and I swear I’ll leave you with something even you can’t heal from.” When she’s done cleaning the wound, she uncorks the little jar of dried yarrow powder she has and pours some onto a cotton bandage. “That’s a promise.” She places the bandage over his wound, and looks up when he lays his hands over hers.

“Applying pressure to stop the bleeding, right?” He’s staring at her so hard it feels like his eyes are boring into her.

“Clever boy,” she snipes. His hands press down on hers a little harder. Neither of them looks away.

“A territory dispute,” he says. “That’s where I was. There was a battle that broke out between two towns about control of a nearby spring. It was a bloodbath.”

She moves her hands up slightly, until they laid across his chest, pressing on the upper half of the wound. Bellamy’s hands move with hers. She feels herself shiver, which is odd, since the chill from the night seems to have subsided. “Hold this down,” she says, slipping her hands out from beneath his. They feel cold all of a sudden. “I need to bind this.”

“It’s true,” he continues, “that the living can’t see me. But war, battle, soldiers… those deaths never happen quietly. They don’t want to die. I mean, no one ever does,” he smiles a smile that’s more a grimace, “but they’re already raring to go down fighting. Even when I’ve taken them…” his eyes flicker down to the gash that she’s tending, “well they’re ready to bite back.”

She runs a thumb along the edge of the wound, raising goosebumps along his skin where she does. “This looks like it hurts.”

Bellamy shrugs. “Like I said, it’ll heal soon. It always does.”

“That doesn’t mean it can’t hurt.”

Clarke starts wrapping bandages over the dressing. She has to reach right around Bellamy to do it, leaning right close to his chest, locked in a strange parody of an embrace to do it. He stays completely still as she does. She swears Bellamy isn’t even breathing.

“Done,” she says. She gets to her feet but doesn’t step away. She’s standing there, in between his legs. Bellamy looks up at her. Without really thinking about, she reaches up to brush her thumb over the bruise on his jaw. He closes his eyes.

“Thank you,” he murmurs.

“I’ll make you some valerian root tea,” she says quietly, “for the pain.”

She turns to move away but his hand comes up to bracelet her wrist. “I owe you an apology,” he says.

Clarke shakes her head. “I shouldn’t have snapped. Just try to give me some warning next time you’re going to be--”

“Not for last night. At least, not just for last night.” He reaches up and takes her other hand, places them both on his shoulders. “I told you I shouldn’t have treated you as though you were stupid, and I meant it. But you…” he shakes his head. “You’re something else, Princess. This -- healing, helping -- it’s a gift. It’s bad enough you’re stuck down here, not able to share it with the world above. It’s worse that I tried to keep you from using it altogether.”

“Bellamy--”  
“I swear to you, Clarke, I won’t make the same mistake again.”

“Confining me?”

He smiles. “Underestimating you.”

She moves her hands to frame his face, gently, careful not to hurt him. There’s something strange about this moment, heavy, weighted in a way she doesn’t know how to describe. It feels like everything is teetering on a balance, wavering on either side of some great precipice.

“Thank you,” she says, “for changing your mind.”

“Thank you for letting me.”  
Acting as if by compulsion, she leans down, brushes her lips to the bruise above his brow. It’s light, barely a touch at all, but he leans into it nonetheless. She pulls back, barely an inch, and rests her forehead against his. _This should feel strange_ , she thinks, _this should feel so strange, especially when I was ready to tear his hair out just last night_. It doesn’t though, doesn’t feel strange to lean into his touch when his own hands come up to clasp the back of her neck, or to lower her face again, to slant her mouth over his. It doesn’t feel to kiss him, slow and soft and lingering, and it doesn’t feel strange when he kisses her back.

*

Things don’t change in any obvious way after that. They do not kiss again, or do anything else. They even retreat politely back to their sides of the bed, only to awake slumped against each other. Clarke can’t quite tell if they touch, more, or if she’s just more aware of each touch of a hand to a shoulder, each nudge of knees under the table.

Because if anything has changed, that’s it -- the _awareness_ . It’s like a living thing, growing and thrumming under her skin, flaring whenever he’s close by. She doesn’t really understand it. It’s not like _he’s_ changed. He’s still the same damnable, maddening husband, who tore her best friend away from her. Who sits by the souls with her, bowed down as if their pain is his own. He’s still Bellamy who argues with her and challenges her and drives her mad. Nothing has changed. But it feels like it has.

She doesn’t know if Bellamy feels it too. Is he different with her? Perhaps. There’s a… a softness to him, she thinks, that wasn’t necessarily apparent before. Sometimes, when she catches his eye,  he smiles at her, which makes her smile back. Other times, he doesn’t smile, just holds her gaze and doesn’t look away, and that makes something unnameable -- something that feels mercurial and ready to set ablaze -- take root in her stomach. But then again, he never talks about it. He seems as collected as ever, every inch a king. For every moment Clarke thinks he might be sharing in this nameless something with her, there’s another where she convinces herself that she’s imagining things.

Still, even she doesn’t think she’s imagining that it means something when Bellamy hovers by the doorframe one morning before both of them are about to leave (Bellamy to visit some of his shrines in the world above, Clarke to meet with some naiads about a rockslide that has blocked their stream).

“Meet me for lunch,” he says, “today.” He sounds nonchalant, but she notices he’s not meeting her eyes.

“As in… in the hall?”  
“No,” he looks at her then. “You’ll be down by the southern groves, right?”  
“Yes.”  
“There’s a huge cedar tree near there, you can’t miss it. I’ll meet you there at noon.” He grins, in that charming boyish way that seems to change his whole face. “I’ll bring a picnic.”

She has to fiddle with her brooch so he can’t see the flood of pink to her cheeks, although she swears he’ll able to hear her heart thumping anyway. “I’ll see you at noon.”

The naiads’ problem seems to be a fairly simple one, when Clarke sees it. The rocks aren’t too large, and look as though they can manually be cleared without too much disruption to the water. “It’ll be muddy,” she warns the naiads, wrinkling her nose, “it might be a few afternoon’s work. But I don’t think it’s too dangerous to handle. I’ll speak to the guards and send some once we’ve developed a specific plan over the next week.”

“Thank you, my lady!” a young man says, “it’s been troubling the fish something awful.”  
By now, she’s good at hiding her surprise about new details of the Underworld she didn’t know, so she lets the realisation that hell has fish slide by without comment.

“Where are you off to for the rest of the day, my lady?” the young naiad man asks, and she gives him some vague answer that she’s sure is unconvincing under the smile she can’t quite repress. But what would she say? _Oh I’m going to have lunch with my husband_. It doesn’t sound like a remarkable thing, not by itself. She smiles to herself nonetheless.

Bellamy was right -- the cedar tree is impossible to miss. For an absurd few minutes, she fidgets wondering how and where best to stand. The trunk is wide, he might not see her if he approaches from the other side. Does it look too eager if she’s standing there with her arms hanging by her sides? Then again folding her arms might seem too standoffish…

_Get. A. Grip._

She shakes herself, sitting down and leaning by the trunk of the tree. Bellamy is on his way, and they’re going to have lunch. By themselves. There’s no sense in panicking about something so trivial.

All she has to do is wait.

And wait.

And wait.

*

 

It’s when Clarke notices the shadows growing long that she concedes he isn’t coming. It’s fine. The hall probably still has some food left, or she can order some up to her chambers. It’s fine, she tells herself as she walks back briskly, letting the slight breeze blow through her hair. He’s busy, and trips to the above world are always unpredictable -- something probably came up that delayed him, some worshippers seeking a great boon, or some last minute accident that required the Lord of Death to oversee it.

Maybe he forgot. He’s busy. It’s fine. 

By the time she reaches the palace again, Clarke honestly feels alright. It’s a rare day when she has nothing else scheduled. She hasn’t seen Cerberus for a while -- she could spend the afternoon playing with him. She doesn’t want him to feel abandoned. 

“ _ \--come on _ , Hades, I know you want this as much as I do.”

Clarke freezes, having to look twice to be sure she’s not imagining what’s in front of her. But when she looks again, it’s still there: Bellamy, in an alcove. Specifically, Bellamy, pressed against the wall of the alcove with Menthe trailing her hands up his arms, leaning awfully awfully close. 

“That girl may be pretty but she can’t possibly be doing it like I did,” the Naiad smiles, leaning somehow closer still. “I know what you like.”

Bellamy doesn’t move. He doesn’t move closer, but he doesn’t move away. “Menthe…”

Maybe she coughs, or her foot scuffs the floor, or something. Clarke doesn’t know what she does, exactly, but she must make a sound because suddenly, the both of them look up, straight at her. 

“Clarke,” Bellamy says, striding forward, but she turns away. She walks, quicker and quicker, trying to drown out the buzzing in her ears. “ _ Clarke _ ,” he calls again behind her, “would you just wait?”   
She whirls around, to do what she doesn’t know, but then she sees Menthe is following, trailing after Bellamy like she’s gearing up for them to placate Clarke together, and something inside her just snaps. “You’re busy,” she hisses, “don’t let me keep you.”   
“Clarke it wasn’t--”

“I’m serious,” she snaps, stepping away from him, “I wouldn’t want to get in the way of you two and your  _ fun _ .”

“Maybe we should leave her for now,” Menthe murmurs, and that does it. Clarke whirls around, and without knowing why, or how, raises her hand and thrusts it towards the Naiad. For a second nothing happens. And then, Menthe gasps, and she seems to be… sinking. Melting into the floor and pooling into a thicket of leaves, unlike any Clarke has ever seen before. She can only stare in as the Naiad seems to disappear and the spread of green, dotted with tiny purple flowers. She should feel something -- horror, probably, confusion, or disgust. But all she can do is take one more look at the leaves, then at her husband, before turning on her heel and marching down the hall. 

Bellamy doesn’t stop, however, and follows her right into their room. 

“Clarke,” he begs, “please just look at me.”   
“It’s fine,” she says, an icy calmness descending over her. “What you do in your time is up to you. In the future, I’d appreciate if you let me know ahead of time if my own plans need to be cancelled--”

“ _ Clarke _ ,” he sounds almost pleading, which is funny. “Just let me explain!”   
“I already told you, I don’t need an explanation. You’re a god, Bellamy, and I know what it means to be married to a god.”

That makes him pause. “What are you talking about?”   
She laughs. “You know who my father is, you know I know how these things work. It’s alright Bellamy, I don’t expect anything as trivial as  _ marriage  _ to stop you from doing whatever you want.”

“Is that what you think?” he says, and the bastard has the gall to sound  _ angry  _ now. “You think I’m just fucking around doing what I want and ignoring the fact that I have a wife?”

“I don’t know, Bellamy, I’m just thinking about what I’ve seen.”

“I told you that wasn’t what it looked like,” he growls, stepping closer to her, right into her space. 

“Seemed pretty hard to mistake if you ask me. Besides, it’s not like today was the first time.”

“You have no idea what you’re talking about.”   
“I thought you were done taking me for an idiot -- I know where you went, the night after the council meeting. You weren’t here, that’s for sure! No wonder you were so content to leave things be on our wedding night, clearly you’re well taken care of elsewhere.”

“Oh?” Bellamy’s eyes glitter dangerously. “Is that the problem, Princess? That what’s bothering you? That according to you I’m off sleeping with other people but I haven’t fucked you?” 

“Shut up,” she hisses, “you’re so full of it.”   
“For the record,” Bellamy says, stepping closer until she has to walk back, walk right back until she hits the wall, “I was coming to find you. There were some issues at the temple and I ran late. And let me tell you, even though I was surrounded by my devotees, the whole time I was tearing at the walls in my head because it was driving me crazy,” he leans down, drops a kiss to her cheek, making her hiss, “keeping you waiting.”

“Fuck you,” she spits.”   
“Soon.” He kisses the underside of her jaw. “Menthe cornered me on the way back. I was turning her  _ down _ ,” he says, “for good. Because I’m married,” he kisses her throat, and his fingers move to the brooch that keeps her chiton pinned up around her neck, “and trust me. I have no desire to get  _ taken care of  _ anywhere else.” 

She can’t take it anymore, can’t bear it. Her own hands fly to the brooch, unpinning it and letting the chiton pool to the floor around her feet, leaving her completely uncovered. Bellamy bends his head to her again but she stops him with a hand on his chest.

“If you’re lying to me,” she tells him, “I swear I’ll  _ ruin  _ you.” Her voice cracks, she doesn’t want it to, but it does.

Bellamy pushes her hair behind her hair behind her ears, cradled her face in his hands. “Princess,” he kisses her full on the mouth. “I’m your husband.” He kisses her again, his hand sliding down her naked back. “Yours.” He pulls back, and the heat is back in his eyes, blazing and unfettered. “And you’re  _ mine _ .” 

She tugs at his tunic until he chuckles darkly, pulling it off and shedding his trousers. He pins her back against the wall, mouthing his way down her neck and collarbone. His hands find her breasts and wrench a gasp from her as he runs his thumbs over them until they stiffen into peaks.

His mouth fixes on her nipple then, making her moan, sending her nails scratching down the golden freckled expanse of his back. Clarke wonders, wildly, how she could ever have thought him cold and heartless, how she could have dismissed him simply as death and dying when she’s never felt more alive than in this moment. 

His mouth trails down her body, leaving wet, sucking kisses in its wake, and she gasps as she feels him move lower and lower, skirting around just shy of where she wants — needs him. 

She gasps, twisting her hands into his curls, winding the black locks around her pale fingers, needing to anchor herself to him, to touch him however she can. 

“So wet,” he murmurs, dropping a kiss to the inner corner of her thigh, and damn him, he’s so close to where she craves him, and he knows it too, but he just brushes his lips over and across her opening to kiss the other thigh, not quite giving into what she wants. “How long have you wanted me, Princess?”

She means to snap something acerbic in retort, but all that comes out is a groan, a broken pant of “please!”

“I asked you a question.”

“So long,” she whimpers, “I’ve wanted this for so long… _ please _ !” 

He pauses, and she can actually feel the bastard grin against her lips. “Good girl,” he says, and she likes that, oh fuck, she likes that. Her moan tells him as much, and it awakens something in him because with a growl he forces her legs further apart and then finally, finally, he puts his mouth where she wants it, licking broad stripes up her centre. 

“Fuck,” she hisses, “more, please, more, I need—ah!”

His mouth moves to her clit, tongue laving ceaselessly as he slips one finger, and then another into her. Clarke rakes her fingers down to the base of his skull and back, powerless to do anything else as he starts stroking her inner walls, gradually getting faster and faster until he’s pumping furiously in and out of her. Stars begin to dance at the edges of her vision and it’s almost more than she can bear. 

“Say it,” he whispers, his relentless rhythm never faltering, his voice some hypnotic combination of an order and a plea, “my name. Say my name.”

“Fuck,” she gasped, “fuck  _ Bellamy _ ! I’m gonna— I need to— Bellamy!”

He crooks his fingers inside her, closes his lips on her clit and sucks all at once, and it’s too much, it’s too much. All of a sudden she’s careening over the edge, crying out so loudly she’d probably be embarrassed if she had it in her to care, to do anything except give in to the formless, mindless bliss that overtakes her, carrying her away on a wave she thinks she’s drowning in.

Bellamy doesn’t let up, pulling her legs apart and resting in the cradle of her hips. She loves it, loves the weight of him, how perfectly he  _ fits _ . 

“Hey,” he stops, pausing until she looks at him, “are you sure?”

She pulls her down to him, kisses him again, feeling like she’ll run out of air to breathe if she ever stops. “Yes,” she tells him between frantic kisses, “yes I’m sure. Come  _ on _ Bell—”

He pushes into her, cutting her whines off into a gasp.”

“ _ Fuck _ ,” he grits out, “so good, Princess. You feel so good.” 

He finds his rhythm almost instantly, a relentless punishing pace that has Clarke grasping at his shoulders and seeing stars. He doesn’t look away from her the whole time, and she tries to hold his gaze, to keep her eyes open. But then he slides his arm under her hips and lifts them up, adjust so he’s hitting  _ that  _ spot and his hips grind against her clit with each stroke. Her eyes roll back in her head, and it’s too much, it’s too good. 

“Come on Princes,” he says, kissing her neck again, grazing it with his teeth, sucking so she knows there’ll be a mark, “come for me.”

When she does, it’s with his name on her lips and his release inside her.

*

He likes to hold her, it turns out. They’re both a little breathless afterword, worn out and sated. She lies with her head pillowed on his chest and his arm banded around her waist.

“I didn’t mean to be late,” he says. “They had prepared a sacrifice. It took longer than expected.”

“It’s alright,” she says. “I was looking forward to it though,” she admits, a little shyly, which seems ridiculous given the circumstances. 

Bellamy traces incoherent patterns up her arm with his fingertips. “We still can,” he says, “I promise not to be late next time.”   
It seems so easy to press her lips to his, now that she knows he can. They stay like that for a while, trading slow, lazy kisses, the incendiary heat of earlier relaxed to a latent warmth. 

“I didn’t mean to hurt you,” he tells her, mouthing the words into her hair. “And I’m sorry I did.”

She goes rigid in his arms, and he notices, because he sits up to look at her. “What is it?”

“Oh my gods,” she stares at him in mounting horror, “oh Zeus above, what did I -- to Menthe -- what did I  _ do _ ?”

“Hey, it’s alright,” he rubs his hand up and down her back soothingly but by now the panic has overtaken her.

“It’s not alright! I… I  _ killed  _ her Bellamy! And I don’t even know how, I--” she looks at him. “How… how are you so calm about this? You saw what I did to her!”

“Clarke, breathe.” 

“I--”

“Breathe.” He waits until the light of sudden horror fades from her eyes a little before continuing. “You forget I’m a God,” he smiles a little, “an old one. Full of surprises as you are, there aren’t actually many things I haven’t seen yet. Believe it or not, metamorphosis is one of the least unusual things about you.”     

She bites her lip. “Metamorphosis?”   

“Surely you’re familiar with it, in practice if not in name -- turning people into other things. Animals, plants, the like.”

Now he describes it, it is familiar. Olympus was full of stories of vengeful Gods and Goddesses turning hapless sprites and spirits and mortals into all manner of creatures: swans, oxen, trees. Come to think of it, it’s no surprise he hardly seems phased -- Bellamy himself must have pulled the same trick hundreds of times, and he’s not even one of its most famous practitioners. 

She looks at her hands. “I-- I’m not like that.”

“You’re a goddess,” he reminds her.

“But I don’t have that kind of power!”

He looks at her thoughtfully. “Don’t you?”

She thinks about it. Somewhere in their chambers, the thorn-riddled nightgown is bundled away in a corner. The same floor beneath their bed was one that mysteriously found itself covered in leaves… 

“It was all me,” she concedes. Now she can acknowledge there was never much doubt about it. It just…didn’t make sense. “I’ve never been able to do anything like this before. I make  _ flowers  _ sprout, for fuck’s sake, I don’t get angry and-- and-- and--”

“And do that?” Bellamy suggests. She follows his gaze to where gnarled ropes of ivy have knotted themselves around the foot of the bed. 

She can only look at him helplessly. “Do you… you don’t think I could be getting  _ more _ powerful do you?”

He stares at the ceiling, thinking. “I don’t know,” he admits. “I think something is changing.” 

“I don’t want it to be like this,” she says, “I don’t want to be a monster.”

That gets his attention. “Whatever it is, we’ll work it out. Teach you how to control it, so that it can’t control you.” She thinks he’s done, but then he says in a low voice, “if there’s a monster here Clarke, it definitely isn’t you.”

“You said you didn’t decide who died, remember? When the Fates cut a thread, your job is to collect the soul.” She threads her fingers through his, and pretends not to notice when his gaze immediately darts to their joined hands. “I know people blame you. I know  _ I  _ blamed you for so long. And losing Nico hurt, it always will, but… I was wrong Bellamy. You didn’t take him, not really. So if you need forgiveness, I’ll give that to you -- you’re forgiven.”

He doesn’t say anything, she almost thinks he hasn’t heard her, but then he presses his lips to her forehead. 

“Sleep,” he murmurs. And they do.

*

Much like after their first kiss, they don’t talk about it afterwards. Just because they… well, did what they did… it doesn’t mean  _ they  _ have to be any different. They work together now, smoothly. The open courts run efficiently -- Clarke can contribute now, and she and Bellamy consult on almost every decision. 

(If sometimes, when they have any particularly heated disagreements, they wait in the throne room until everyone else has left and fall on each other like wild things, fucking right on the throne where Bellamy sits, that’s no one’s business). 

There are more banquets too, ceremonial and otherwise. Once, Bellamy’s hand slips over her thigh right there under the table. He gets her off with his fingers, and it’s all she can do to not to cry out as Grumius wanders up to the table to thank her for what seems like the thousandth time since she sent him his remedy. 

These kinds of things are just a part of their routine now. Everything is going fine, for two people forced into a marriage against their will, Clarke reasons, and there’s nothing to talk about. 

Except one day, when Bellamy has her pressed up against a tree -- the large cedar tree he was supposed to be, the one he is currently pounding into her against, his way of making amends -- he leans forward and says in her ear “rule with me.”

“What?”   
“Rule with me.”

“I --  _ fuck  _ \-- I thought I already did.”

“You do. I meant officially.” He grips her hips, pulls her harder against him, making her moan. “Be my Queen. Be Queen of Hell.”

She doesn’t respond until he takes her over the edge and she’s calmed down -- this is the kind of conversation that needs to be held face-to-face. 

“What do you mean?”

“At the moment, you’re officially Queen Consort. I think you should be crowned. Become Queen in your own right. You’re right, you do already rule along with me, in most of the ways that matter. You should have a title and power that reflect that.

“You’re the God of the Underworld, Bellamy,” she says, uncertain.

“That won’t change. The rites of the Dead are and always will be my domain. But the Underworld is also a kingdom, a kingdom with responsibilities and people. People who grow more fond of you every day, I might add.”

“I…” she hesitates. “I don’t know Bellamy. I’m already worried about what’s happening to my powers down here. Putting me in that kind of position, giving me  _ more  _ power -- I don’t know if that’s a good idea.”   
“And if you really don’t want this, we won’t do it. But you wouldn’t be doing this alone, Clarke. We’d be ruling together.”

“Together?”

He nods.

“Okay,” she whispers.   
He actually looks surprised, delighted even. He kisses her, and tells her they’ll have the ceremony next week, and then kisses her again.

(They talk about the upcoming coronation a lot. They don’t talk about the kissing -- that part doesn’t matter). 

*

“Well,” the voice comes from above them, jarringly cheerful for this time in the morning, “isn’t this a cosy sight.”

Bellamy’s on his feet, sword-in-hand before Clarke even fully sits up in the bed. Her eyes widen as she recognises the wiry, wry-faced man stood at the foot of the bed.

“Hermes,” Bellamy grits out, “what are you doing here?”

The messenger god shrugs, an artful, full-bodied motion. “Paying a visit. It is a special privilege of mine to be able to pop in down here, after all.”

“You need to explain what it is you’re doing in my  _ bedchamber  _ or I’ll make sure you experience all the hospitality Hell has to offer.”

Hermes holds his hands up, in a placating gesture. “I come bearing news. News I believe your lovely wife in particular will find most interesting.”

Bellamy is as taut as a bow, and his eyes are locked on Hermes, sharp as flint. 

“What is it?” Clarke asks, heart pounding. 

“It appears that word has at last reached Lady Demeter that her beloved daughter has been, ah, sadly  _ misplaced _ .”

Neither of them move. Not a breath sounds in the room. 

“She hasn’t discovered where you’ve gone yet, of course, or who with,” his eyes flick to Bellamy. “But worry not, her search is on. I probably owe you a congratulations. It seems, Lady Persephone, that you may soon be returned safely home after all.”

Hermes does as Hermes is wont to do -- bows jauntily, speaks a command to his winged sandals, and disappears through the open window. 

Bellamy doesn’t turn around. “He’s right,” he says, and his voice is rough. “Congratulations.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading!
> 
> Btw on the subject of Greek Mythology, I highly recommend everyone checks out "Mythos" by Stephen Fry. I listened to the audiobook (outstanding btw) over Christmas and I'd been in the mood to write a Greek Mythology fic ever since then.
> 
> If you enjoyed this chapter, please please drop a comment! I've been both super excited and super nervous to post this, so any and all feedback would be much appreciated and super motivating <3

**Author's Note:**

> If you've made it to the end, I would really appreciate a comment letting me know what you thought or what you want to see in upcoming chapters! I hope you enjoyed it, and thank you so much for reading <3


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